


The Boiling Point

by Tierfal



Series: Loud and Clear [7]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drama, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-03-08 01:51:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 68,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18885691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: When the shadows take on unkind shapes, sometimes hanging on for dear life is the best – or the only – course of action. At least Ed already knows how.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> NO, IT'S NOT DEAD!  Of course it's not dead!  This fic will outlive all of us.  It'll keep updating long after I'm in a plot in the ground somewhere. XD
> 
> ……kidding, but I'm still working on the final part (I thought that the one I finished back in December was going to be the final part, but… apparently there's another one, so if anyone would like to order a hit on me, now's the time) between other projects.  I think we're looking at a total of two more full-fic-sized parts after the one in front of you!  And then we will all finally, finally be free. XD
> 
> This is a VERY long note, but parts of it are important, so please bear with me!
> 
> A few things I want to mention for full disclosure:
> 
> 1\. The trajectory of Ed's career is slightly fantastical in and of itself, but less realistic still is how fast his research gets to the clinic and makes him hashtag-famous. This is IMPOSSIBLE, but I didn't really think about it very much when I started this fic in 2014 and locked myself into a timeline. At that point, I thought that this project would come out to be about 6,000 words, rather than… 600,000. o__o'''' I tend to explain away these sorts of things with "Well, it's _Ed_ ," which, while valid, does not change the caveat I now want to make, just to have it in so many words: Please do not use this fanfic as career advice. XD
> 
> 2\. The other extremely unrealistic thing about this fic is how little drama/bullshit/politics are involved in Ed's position in academia. That one was more deliberate, because I wanted to let Ed have one (1) nice thing. :'D
> 
> 3\. I've been in too many courtrooms, because I have shit luck and get jury duty summonses like clockwork, but I've narrowly managed to avoid actually going through a trial every time, so I'm sort of winging it on that, too. Or are real trials not like the one in "My Cousin Vinny"????  My life is a lie. :'(
> 
> 4\. As some of you have probably noticed, sort of on purpose, sort of accidentally, consent has become a major theme in this story.  In this particular installment, there's a lot of discussion of affirmative consent in particular, in ways that could potentially be triggering for some people.  I'll flag it in the notes on the chapter where that's most prominent, but please heed the heads-up! And feel free to drop me a line if you're concerned about that and would like some more specifics before you decide if you want to read on. ♥
> 
> 5\. Another content warning: stalking. Lots of it. Please be safe; let me know if you need details. ♥
> 
> 6\. An un-content warning: I meant to write a proper smut scene for this installment… AND THEN I DIDN'T. If that sort of thing isn't your jam, you're welcome (though there is still lots of movement in that direction, just nothing explicit); if it is your jam, I promise I have made up for it in the next one. ;D
> 
> 7\. Happy almost 5/20, my loves. ♥ You guys make all of the extremely considerable amount of time that goes into this stuff worth it, and I'm honestly grateful for your support every minute of the day. ♥ I hope this monster was worth the wait, and I'm honestly really excited to be able to finish this accidental epic for you guys someday soon. ♥
> 
> 8\. If you're going to Fanime next weekend, keep your eyes peeled for me – I'm hoping to have a lineup on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/cicinettle/) later today!
> 
> So that brings us to: the **recap to end all recaps** , as far as where we left off!
> 
> Last time, in our past-tense five-years-prior story, Ed and Roy talked their way back out of the Sad Breakup Pit and made up – but not before Kimblee rear-ended Ed's car and then took him to the hospital to get stitches. Ed has not mentioned to Roy that Kimblee was the one who did the damage to his car (and to his face), because of Reasons, including reasons such as "Ed Why Are You Like This". There was makeup sex, though. Ed's work is super stressful, and his one (1) lab member had to fly home for a family emergency, which left him alone and even more overworked than normal. Roy's current case (Bradley's original tax fraud lawsuit) is starting to get the better of him as he accidentally digs up all sorts of questionable history; and Ed's anxiety is starting to get the better of him (but it's definitely not anxiety; he doesn't have anxiety; who even told you that?), and he's starting to think he hears and sees Kimblee in places he clearly doesn't. And wouldn't. And won't. Right?
> 
> Present-tense/current-day Ed is still wandering around the UK while trying to deal with the whole Roy-being-called-as-a-witness-for-Bradley's-war-crimes-trial-because-Roy-did-terrible-things-in-Afghanistan business, which is going about as well as one would imagine. But he talked it out with Gracia on the phone and now feels a little bit stabler about all of it, and he's currently gathering himself up to talk to Roy.

Ed’s University of Glasgow hosts treat him to an absolutely fucking incredible steakhouse dinner, which is one of the perks of professorship that he never really knew about—“grant funding” turns into “gourmet funding” so often it sort of blows his mind.  Sure, it’s easy enough to justify the expenditure of university money by categorizing all of the social shit as “business meals”; and sure, they do talk a lot about science and work and whatever most of the time—but still.  When he was a grad student, his home university was paying him peanuts to survive while he and the other students and the even-poorer postdocs were doing the bulk of the _real_ work for the lab.

It’s just—sad-funny, that’s all.  How the priorities of a place bend the finances around them.  How it doesn’t trickle down; how the system itself pits people against each other; how the ones with the power to change the structure of it are the ones that benefit the most—

Anyway.  Steak.  And he’s smart enough to turn down the wine; and then he catches his train back to Edinburgh in the nick of fucking time, so maybe, _maybe_ , that sliver of coincidental luck will hold.

He waits until he’s safely in the damn hotel room before he checks his phone.  Getting emotional on public transit without anyone around you finding out is the psychological equivalent of an extreme sport, and he’s really not ready for the pro leagues yet.

He sits down on the edge of the bed—at least it’s not fucking purple, even if the orange of the streetlamp outside is streaming through the curtains like they’re cheesecloth—and unlocks his phone.  He coaxes it into accepting the wifi, and then he taps back over to his messages.

Roy always, always, _always_ answers him.

But this isn’t as fucking simple as a set of gold balances where he’s stacking little weights on each side of the scale—this isn’t a chemical equation; this isn’t a spreadsheet with columns for pros and cons; this isn’t a game.

This is real fucking life.

And it’s complicated.

He tries to shove the whole tangled mess of that aside and focus on the contents of the little text bubble.

_What the doctor doesn’t know won’t hurt him… may very well hurt me, but I digress.  I’m going to go in for a half-day at court and then use the recess to help Riza get everything sorted out.  I should be able to be online by 6:30 or 7 your time._

The clock on Ed’s phone, which has synchronized itself to local time, helpfully indicates that it’s a few minutes past eight.

It’s more efficient to check and see if Roy’s already on Skype than it is to text him to ask—so says Ed’s overwhelmed and more-than-slightly-tormented brain, at any rate.  He forces himself to keep his movements slow and deliberate while he plugs in his laptop and opens it up; if he lets himself fucking panic, he’s going to drop something, or break something.  Something like himself, for instance.

He knows where he stands—or, at least, what he’s going to say, which is functionally the same thing, given how much presentation counts for in this world.  Most of the time, all you have to go on is what gets said.

He signs back into Skype and bests the extremely persuasive impulse to hold his breath.

Roy Mustang is online.

Roy Mustang has sent him a request to video chat.

He takes one deep breath, then two, and then he jams his finger down on the key to raise the volume, and then he clicks the little green button to accept.

Roy’s face—accompanied, naturally enough, by his shoulders and part of his chest, with a frame of the back of the living room couch and a bit of wall—fills up his screen.

Someone who didn’t know Roy very well wouldn’t realize that this facial expression isn’t calm and collected and neutral—not real neutral, anyway.

This is guardedness, straight through.

This is Roy bracing himself for the worst thing he can think of, and smoothing every last indication of it off of his face in the hopes of protecting both of them from the weight of that expectation.

Roy is a good man.  That is the fucking _kicker_ —he’s so fucking thoughtful; he’s so fucking nice; he’s so fucking gentle and compassionate and _kind_.  He is, at the core, an entirely decent person who has done an unthinkable thing.

And fuck leaving him in suspense.  Ed’s not cruel like that.  This isn’t about fucking vengeance; this isn’t about anything as petty as making either of them suffer more.  The world’s got enough of that.

“Hey,” Ed says, pitching his voice low and as quiet as he dares.  “Listen.  I’m with you.  Okay?  I’m with you for the fucking long haul.  But I need you to be straight with me—from here on out, and all the way back to the beginning.  I need you to be straight with me, and I need to know all of it.  Okay?”

Roy—

—covers his mouth with one hand, closing his eyes.  He drags his palm down, then rubs ruefully at the gauze on his chin.

And then he smiles like he’s sitting in the first sunbeam after years on years of darkness.

“Not _too_ straight, I hope,” he says.  “Honest-straight I can promise you.  Heterosexual-straight, I’m not so su—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Ed says.

Roy grins broadly.  His eyes are a little too bright.

“I’m gonna need you to catch me up,” Ed says.  “On everything.  Everything you’ve done, that you are—I mean… Shit like this—Jesus, Roy, you don’t have to carry it all by yourself.”

The grin dwindles into a thin half-smile, and the glimmer in Roy’s eyes is gone.  “Perhaps I should.”

“Fuck ‘should’,” Ed says.  “I said you don’t _have_ to.”  He swallows, hard, but the prickling swollen monstrosity in his throat doesn’t budge.  “Because I’m part of this, okay?  You and me—we’re supposed to share the weight of shit like that.  That’s what this is about.  I don’t just want you when you’re perfect.  I don’t just want you when you’re pure.  I want you all the time.  Okay?  So you have to level with me, and you have to let me _in_.”

Roy looks at him—intently, thoughtfully, searching—for a long series of seconds.

“You might want to leave,” he says softly.  “Afterwards.  That’s your right, if you do, but you should know.”

Ed eyes him.  “What’ve you got that’s worse than this?”

Roy opens his mouth.

He closes it again.

He stares down at the bedspread, brow wrinkling a little, and then raises his gaze to the screen again, looking slightly puzzled.

“I have a few things that are similar,” he says.  “But I don’t… I don’t think anything— _worse_.”

“Then you’re stuck with me,” Ed says.

A flash of the grin curls the corner of Roy’s lips.  “What a terrible shame.”

“I know,” Ed says.

“I can think of nothing in the world that I would prefer,” Roy says, “to being ‘stuck’ with you.”

The unfortunate growth stopping Ed’s esophagus expands a little more.  What a pain in the ass.  And in the throat.  Jeez.  “Good, ’cause I didn’t give you a choice.”  He shifts a little, and the crappy hotel mattress creaks.  “I was—thinking about changing my ticket back.  I could fly into D.C. and meet you there.”

Roy’s expressions are harder to read on a laptop screen than face-to-face, but that looks like a combination of surprise and… gratitude?

“Isn’t your lab going to need you?” he asks.

“I can corral them remotely,” Ed says.  “And I begged off teaching for the rest of the week anyway in case my flights got delayed, or I was just too jet-lagged.  And it’d—well, I’m hoping it’d only be a couple more days.”  He pauses.  He skipped a part.  “I mean—shit, if you don’t want me there, or something, of course I can just—”

“Everything is better with you there,” Roy says.  “Even this would suck a bit less.  It’s just that I would hate nothing more than to inconvenience you or impact your work after everything you’ve already been th—”

“If my lab can’t handle themselves for an extra half a week,” Ed says, “I’m gonna fire ’em all anyway.”

“That might be a bit harsh,” Roy says.

Ed shrugs.

Then he clicks over to his browser, making it small enough that he can still see the Skype window.  “Hang on, I’m gonna figure out what the flights are.”

“You,” Roy says, “are so much more than I deserve.”

“Bullshit,” Ed says.

“Far from it,” Roy says.

“Don’t you sass me,” Ed says.

“You’d be disappointed if I didn’t,” Roy says.

Ed makes a face at him.

Roy smiles winsomely.

And Ed’s heart is still heavy; his brain is still buzzing; and the world is still fucking _cold_ —

But he’s so, so damn relieved.

They haven’t lost this.  Not forever, not for good.  They haven’t lost _each other_.

“It looks like I could get in Wednesday night,” Ed says.  The eight-hour time difference between here and home minus the three-hour difference between the East Coast and home would leave him with less of a circadian nightmare, at least theoretically.  “Are you staying in a hotel or something?”

He glances over in time to see Roy’s nod.  “One side or the other is putting me up.  I can’t remember which lawyers are doing what anymore.”  He grimaces, and it’s not the overstated, melodramatic version of that expression that Ed’s used to—there’s an exhaustion in it, and a shadow underneath.  “I think I had better do my homework before I go.”

Ed tries not to wince back.  “I guess so.”

After another moment, Roy’s smile comes back—weak but genuine, and that’s something to go on.  That’s a lot more than they had yesterday.

“Hey,” Roy says softly.

Ed raises his eyebrows, because he’s not sure he trusts his voice.

Roy holds his hand out towards the screen—palm open, fingers spread.

Ed reaches out to mirror him so fast he almost high-fives his fucking laptop hard enough to knock it off the bed.

“Thank you,” Roy says.  “You probably shouldn’t have given me a second chance.”

“Tough shit,” Ed says, resisting the urge to press his skin right up against the screen and try to leach some warmth from it so that he can at least _pretend_.  “I wanted to.  No take-backs.”

“No take-backs,” Roy says.

So all that’s left is moving forward, right?

  


* * *

  


Life went on, as life always did.

Paola came back worn out and weary-eyed but with a spark of dogged determination to _accomplish_ something that lit a matching flame in the center of Ed’s chest.  He wanted to do right by her.  He wanted to lift her up; he wanted to make it possible for her to go out there and conquer the whole fucking world and take back more from it than it had ever taken from her.

He also wanted to double his coffee intake so that he could get more shit done faster.

That might have been an ill-advised solution for the slew of problems washing in around him, but he had to try stuff like this while he was still young enough to play it off as reckless naïveté, right?  Twenty-five was about the limit.  He only had a couple more months to milk this shit.

He ended up at Has Beans on the next Sunday after the reconciliation-reunion-thing with Roy.  The insurance company had paid to fix up his poor damn car—grumbling the entire time about how it would be cheaper for them to buy him a new model than to repair the current one, given how old and decrepit the thing was, but Ed _liked_ his car, and fuck insurance companies anyway—so he was once again vehicularly-empowered and fancy-free.  He’d dropped Roy off at the office, since apparently there were “files” to be mulled over and rearranged, which Ed figured was probably the secret lawyer way of saying “I haven’t stressed about this enough yet”, but he wasn’t in much of a position to talk.

He parked in the lot behind the coffee shop, which turned out to be great, because Rosé was sitting on the bench out back with a book in her lap when he walked up.

“Hello, stranger,” he said.

Delighted comprehension dawned on her face in the same instant that she startled, and by the time she looked up, it was a full-blown grin.

“Hello yourself!” she said, setting the book facedown on the slats to mark her place and jumping up to hug him.  “Are you quitting coffee, or what?”

“Don’t even say that,” Ed said.  “The caffeine gods will hear you.  Nah, just—busy.  Y’know.”

“Don’t I,” Rosé said.  “You gonna stick around a little while?  I get off my break in a couple minutes.”

“Probably,” Ed said, because that was the realistic assumption in a world where Marta existed, “but I don’t want to mooch your break.  You wanna get lunch sometime so we can catch up properly?”

“I don’t know why you asked that as a question,” Rosé said, still beaming, “but I’d love to.  I started at this new job that’s amazing—part-time, around this; it’s great—and I want to hear _everything_ about your professor thing.  Text me?”

“You bet,” Ed said.

Speaking of Marta, actually, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect: Sunday had been one of her days back when he was a wage-slave here, but he wasn’t sure whether it still was; and if so, he wasn’t sure if she was going to greet him with a bear-hug or a sucker-punch.

When he walked into the shop proper, she was up on a stepladder—a much too familiar-looking stepladder, as far as Ed was concerned—rearranging the displays on their merchandise bookshelf.  There was a big, haphazard pyramid-pile of boxed store-logo coffee mugs behind her, on the short leg of the L-shaped counter—there weren’t enough patrons in the store at the moment for any of them to be sitting over here, so it was a good time for it.  The giant jars of beans and the looming grinder and the digital scale looked on from the countertop against the wall, and Ed couldn’t help casting a semi-fond look at the shelves along the inside, where all the awful seasonal decorations still lurked in giant plastic bins.  He’d had some good times with those crappy fake spider-webs and Gordian tangles of non-denominational seasonal holiday lights.

…or not, but.  Y’know.  Whatever.

“Good timing,” Marta said as he walked over.  He’d been resisting the urge to do the sheepish-“Hi” thing and shove his hands in his pockets, because he might need those hands free to defend himself if she saw fit to whack him for his ongoing disappearing act, but she just pointed to the mugs.  “Hand those up to me?”

He moved over and held the first one out to her.  “You know I don’t work here anymore, right?”

“The only thing better than cheap labor,” Marta said, “is free labor.”  She turned the mug box so that the picture almost faced the front, just _slightly_ off-center.  Nice and artful or… something.  “How’ve you been?”

“Alive,” he said, holding up another one.  “You?”

“Same,” she said.  “You here to buy anything, or just gracing us with your glorious presence?”

“Uh,” he said.  “I need coffee beans.  But also that, I guess.”

“Good,” she said.  “I was worried you were getting sentimental.  Or that you were going to ask for your job back.”

“I miss it sometimes,” he said, lifting up another one, “but I’m pretty sure I’d die.”

“Russell’s gone,” Marta said.  “So at least you wouldn’t have to worry about going to jail for murder.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ed said.  “Ran into him at Grounds Rules and almost had a heart attack.”

“He’s good for that,” Marta said.  “But I don’t wish him ill, so I won’t talk shit.  You can ask him for the details if you want.”

“I can imagine pretty vividly,” Ed said.

From this angle, he could just see Marta’s smirk.  “I bet.”

When the mugs were all flawlessly arranged or whatever—Ed had absolutely no eye for that sort of thing, which Marta knew better than most—she climbed down half a step and dusted off the tops of a few of the items on lower shelves.  Ed started stacking up the remaining mug boxes so that they’d be easier to put away, since that seemed like a good way to make use of his idle hands while he was here anyw—

“Oh, go ahead,” Rosé was saying from the back.

“No,” the voice said, low and smooth and liquid like an oil slick.  “I insist.”

Ed’s heart flung itself up into the back of his mouth and _banged_ like a whole fucking regiment of bass drums.

“All… right,” Rosé said, offering an awkward little laugh.  “Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” Kimblee said, “I assure you.”

Ed couldn’t think.  Ed could barely fucking see.

He darted around the back of the ladder, smacking the small of his back against the edge of the countertop, swung around the corner, and then dove into the alcove that made up the long side of the _L_ -shaped counter—but trying to duck ended in slipping, so he scooted backwards on his ass, struggling to fucking _breathe_ , which was hard when all he could think about—

The only thought bursting over and over—the only damn bubble in his whole fucking brain—was making sure no part of him showed over the fucking counter, making _sure_ that no one would ever know that he was here—

Not no one.  Someone.  Someone in particular.

“Hi, there,” Marta said calmly.  The ladder creaked as she moved down.  “I’ll be right with you.”

“Excellent,” Kimblee said.

Vague floor-and-feet noises were the most Ed could make out over the pounding of his pulse in his ears and the scrape of breath in and out of him—that was the part he had to keep his mind on, right?  In and fucking out; in and fucking _out_ ; he’d be fine; he’d be fine if he just kept fucking breathing.

Right?

“What can I get for you?” Marta asked, from slightly further away this time.

“How are your cappuccinos?” Kimblee asked.

“Epic,” Marta said.

“I suppose you have to say that,” Kimblee said.

“Not really,” Marta said.  “I mean it.  I worked at Starbucks for two years, and at the place down the street for another three, and I’ve had coffee just about everywhere you can get it in this state.  There’s a place on Oxford that’s worth trying, but they over-roast their beans sometimes.”  He could imagine her shrugging.  “Our stuff is the best.”

“That’s an interesting perspective,” Kimblee said.

“Thanks,” Marta said crisply.  “I aspire to being found interesting.”

There was a really, really long pause.

“I’d like a cappuccino,” Kimblee said.

“I could fix you up with a straight espresso if you’d like,” Marta said.  “Gives you a better idea.”

“A cappuccino will be fine,” Kimblee said.

“You got it,” Marta said.  Register key sounds.  “For here or to go?”

“I’ll be staying,” Kimblee said.  “Cappuccinos in paper cups are for heathens.”

There was another pause.

“Can I get you anything else?” Marta asked.

“Just that,” Kimblee said.

The register bell chimed as the drawer sprung open.  “That’ll be three fifty-three.”  Little noises, then— “Debit or credit?”

“Credit,” Kimblee said.

Using a card always made it easier to pretend to forget the tip.

Oh, holy fucking _shit_ , Kimblee was _here_ , and Ed was _trapped_ , and there was nothing he could fucking do but press his spine back against the shelves on the inside of the counter hard enough to summon up another bruise—

And fucking pray to deities that he knew did not exist that his heart wouldn’t beat loud enough to give him away.

“Here you go,” Marta said.  “I’ll have that up for you in just a minute.”

“Excellent,” Kimblee said.

Ed held one hand over his mouth; he was probably breathing too loud; it _sounded_ too loud; it sounded like a fucking bellows—like he was wheezing, like even the air was out to fucking hurt him—

His fingernails were digging into his cheek.  He wanted to close his eyes, but he didn’t fucking dare take away his only source of knowledge other than the faint, faint, distant little sounds—

“Sir?” Marta called.  “You, uh—might not want to sit there.  There was a lady a couple minutes ago who kept sitting her kid up on it, and… well, I was gonna hit it with some bleach in a minute.  You know, just in case.”

“I see,” Kimblee said from _way too fucking close_ —

Because he’d been about to sit there.

At the counter.

Two fucking feet from Ed, probably close enough that if he shifted upward in his seat, he’d be able to see over the edge, and—

Tears stung sharply at the corners of Ed’s eyes; his heart kept fucking ramming at the sides of his ribcage—every side; every which way; everywhere at once—

He couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t breathe; what if he actually fucking _died_ here; what if he suffocated?  What if he passed out?  What if Kimblee _saw_ him; what if—?

His shoulders shook with the effort of holding in the terrified fucking sobs, and where the hell had Rosé ended up?  She’d been about to walk in with fucking _Kimblee_ , but he hadn’t heard a word out of her; what if she was about to come around that corner and see him like this?  What if she said something and gave him away?  What—

A soft squeal—he knew that damn noise after all these years; that was a chair being pulled out from one of the tables halfway across the store.  Someone on the far end near the windows cleared their throat.

Did that mean Kimblee had sat down—a safe distance away this time?

Oh, God; oh, fucking _God_ ; Ed was such a fucking wreck—

How the hell had that bastard known that he’d be here?

Maybe he hadn’t.  Surely he hadn’t fucking _known_ —surely it was just a coincidence.  It was just sheer bad fucking luck that Soph Kimblee had sauntered into one of Ed’s last few fucking sanctuaries and violated it in an instant.

He was never going to feel safe here again.

How long was this going to go on?  How many places—places he liked; places that were important to him; places that were home to real and significant parts of his _life_ —was he going to have to cross off his list forever now that they were tainted by the brush of Kimblee’s fucking hands?

“Hey,” Marta said from register-distance.  “Can you finish this up for me?  Regular cappuccino.”

“Sure,” Rosé said.

“Thanks,” Marta said—and then footsteps, and then the footsteps coming around that fucking corner of the counter; and even though he _knew_ it was her, everything in him went so tight it trembled.

Marta’s face stayed completely neutral, and she didn’t even look at him as she swung around the bend and strode right over towards him.

She did look at him when she crouched down—right into his lousy, pathetic, tear-blurred fucking eyes.

She held out a little strip of paper—a scrap torn off of the receipt machine.

_I got you,_ it said.  _It’s going to be ok._

If that was supposed to stop him from crying, she had probably not thought it through.

Gently, she tapped her hand on his knee, then grabbed up the little plastic barrel of cleaning wipes on the shelf next to him, stood, and turned on her heel to walk off again.

Ed parted the fingers of the hand still held over his mouth to try to let more air through to his hungry lungs—which were not doing an especially stellar job right this second, it needed to be noted, given that their purpose was to take in oxygen and distribute it to the rest of his body.  Instead of working on that whole project, they were currently just sort of letting his ricocheting heart beat the shit out of them, which was both inconvenient, as far as his larger goal of maintaining a working respiratory system; and _painful_.

He just had to breathe.  Fucking hell; he just had to breathe; he’d get through this somehow; he knew he would; he had to.  Marta would be pissed otherwise.  She had his back.  They had his back here; they cared about him, even months after he’d stopped being useful to them.  They were willing to protect him without knowing anything except that he was scared out of his fucking mind.

He tipped his head back, staring at the ceiling—which he’d done his fair share of during slow mornings here back in the day—while he tried to force his brain to count the duration of his breaths.  Easy.  It was easy shit; and he had to go easy on himself.  He was going to be fine; Kimblee was all the way over there; the fucker had no idea Ed was holed up here like a fucking prey animal cowering in its den, quivering with anticipation of the teeth sinking into its neck.

It was hard to listen to his own breathing when he was simultaneously desperately trying to attune himself to the sounds from further out in the room—maybe if he could hear something Kimblee did; maybe if he could figure out some fucking _reason_ —

What kind of an explanation was he looking for, anyway?  He’d always had the worst fucking luck.  Universal payback was a bitch.  He’d been a little—well, a perfectly reasonable, average-sized—shit his entire life, and this was his due for it.  No great fucking mystery.  Bad things happened to good people, sure, but they also happened to people who deserved it.  He was one of those.  He was a karmic fucking lightning rod.

And there wasn’t anything for it but to suck it up and cope.

His heart hadn’t slowed in its pattering rampage, but he was more or less oxygenating his own blood at this point, so that was a start.  That was the thing—the thing he’d learned the hard way, over and over and over again.  He was a fucking survivor.  The world could kick him while he was down as many times as it wanted, but he always found a way to drag his weary body forward when the worst of the beating was over.  There was nothing it could throw at him that he couldn’t _live_ through—even if sometimes a part of him that was just so fucking tired of nursing bruises thought maybe it’d be better if he… didn’t.  If all of it just _stopped_.

But not now.  Now there were some deliberately slow counter-cleaning kinds of noises; and then Rosé was saying “Cappuccino?”; and then there were footsteps; and then a “Thank you, dear” which was met with a totally monotone “You’re welcome, sir”; and then the chair squeaked against the floor again.  Ed gave in to the urge to squeeze his eyes shut to try to block out the whole fucking universe.  Kimblee wasn’t the type to kill time on his phone; he thought distraction was for mindless plebeians who couldn’t trust themselves with their own thoughts.

How long did it take to drink a fucking cappuccino?

Couldn’t be more than a couple of minutes, right?

Ed could last that long.  Ed could weather that shit and so much more.

All he had to do was fucking _breathe_.

  


* * *

  


He lost track of time.  It had to have been less than ten minutes, logically speaking; but in his head the whole thing was just a knife-edged nightmare awash in the drumming of his heartbeat and the urgent answering rush of his blood.

“Thank you,” Marta said as the chair squeaked just a little bit again.  “Have a nice day.”

“And you,” Kimblee said, and then footsteps, and then the specific creak of the hinges on the door—

Ed breathed in, and out, and scrubbed the heels of his hands across the little damp spots at the corners of his eyes.

Marta gave it another minute before she was reappearing around the corner of the counter with a tissue box in her hand.  She crouched again, held it out to him, and eyed him as he grabbed a Kleenex—which was less because his body was producing enough fluids for that to be necessary than because he didn’t want to refuse a gesture that nice.

“I’m going to take my break,” Marta said.  “Come on out back with me.”

That one he _couldn’t_ refuse, because it was an order thinly disguised as a request.  Marta had always been good at those.

She stood and offered him a hand up, though.  He wished he didn’t need it, but he could feel that his fucking knees had turned to goop.  She wouldn’t lord it over him later, either, so it was safe to accept the help.

When they were upright, she brushed what might have been imaginary coffee grounds dust off of his shoulder, then grabbed his elbow and started hauling him out towards the back of the store.

“Back in a second,” she said to Rosé.  “Devon was supposed to be in five minutes ago.  Call him and bitch him out if he doesn’t turn up.”

Ed chanced a glance at Rosé.  She looked a little confused but not especially judgmental, and she was nodding.  “I’ll… tell him he’s a tragic disappointment to the whole industry.”

“Close enough,” Marta said.

She pulled Ed up the steps and all the way out to the little bench, where she sat him down and then stepped back to dig through her pockets for a pack of cigarettes.  Marta’s motions tended to strike Ed as unapologetically aggressive most of the time, but something about the practice of this particular habit was more graceful than anything else—she drew out a cigarette, flipped it into the corner of her mouth, cupped the end, lit it, slung the lighter and the pack both back into two different pockets, took a long drag, and breathed a thick curl of smoke out slow.

“Those things are gonna kill you,” Ed said, sounding slightly feeble and more than slightly stupid to his own ears.

“Everybody dies sometime, Sunshine,” Marta said.  “Better this than the nerves.”

Ed wasn’t going to think about that any more than he had to.

“Sorry,” he said instead.  “About—all of that.  And—thanks.  Jesus.  Thank you.”

“Sure,” she said.  Another long-drawn breath, then another plume of smoke.  “You wanna talk about it?”

He really, really didn’t, but he sort of owed her an explanation.

“Not much to talk about,” he said.  “I dated him.  It was a fucking mistake.  It’s now a fucking mistake that came back to haunt me, because he keeps turning up everywhere.”

Marta folded her arms across her chest and nodded.  “I thought maybe it was something like that.  You still with that lawyer guy?”

Ed tried to smile.  It probably looked fucking grotesque.  “Yeah.”

“He know about this?” Marta asked.

Ed attempted a shrug, which worked about as well as smiling.  “He’d just get worried.”

Marta caught the cigarette in two fingers and blew a thin trail of smoke towards the sky.

“Maybe he should,” she said.

Roy had enough shit to worry about—real shit, real problems, not just the piles of crap Ed always brought down on his own damn head by being a fucking idiot.  Ed was enough of a burden on that man’s psyche without throwing this whole sad little adventure into the mix.  Roy was already carrying him in so many ways—all his weird hangups; all his idiosyncrasies and shit.  Roy had picked him back up after a shitstorm of Ed’s own making and sworn up and down that he still wanted the source of that shitty-ass weather; that he _wanted_ the wind and the sleet and the driving rain that poured out of Ed’s lousy-ass excuse for a soul every time he let his guard down.  Roy was making room in his gorgeous fucking life for that.  Roy was already doing too much.

Ed wasn’t going to shove this shit in his face, too.

“Maybe,” he said.

“You okay?” Marta asked, using her elbow to indicate the Kleenex box he was still clutching in both hands.  “Or are you going to be?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.

Maybe if he said it enough, he’d start to believe it.

  


* * *

  


A part of him liked the idea of walking the distance down to Roy’s office just to clear his head, but most of the rest of him was proposing counterpoints, such as the highly-persuasive _What if Kimblee is wandering around on the sidewalks window-shopping for steak knives?_  Another part of him was even more terrified, however, that the fucker would be out in the parking lot—he’d come in the back way, too, originally, after all.  Unless he’d fucked _right_ off after a single cappuccino—unless that had been the entire purpose of his driving all the way over here and searching out a parking space on a Sunday afternoon—his goddamn motherfucking Lexus was probably lurking out there somewhere, and what if he came back to it right at the same time as Ed got to his car, and what if—

So maybe Ed would walk after all.

Maybe he’d fucking _run_.

At least he’d have a head start if he heard anybody behind him, right?  He’d only look a little bit crazy pelting down the street in jeans and a bleach-spotted collegiate T-shirt (Al still brought that up sometimes, because Al was evil; this was all part of some universal plot to make Ed stop doing laundry forever, wasn’t it?  How had he not noticed until now?).  That was completely normal jogging attire in a Lulu Lemon matchy-matchy yoga-worshiping hotspot suburb downtown stretch, after all.  Nobody would suspect a thing.

Fuck.

Ed had a weird, crawly-guts feeling about the parking lot, so he took a deep breath—and the espresso shot that Marta had offered on the house, which was accompanied by the comment “Wish we had the kind of drink you really need, but liquor licenses are expensive”—and forged out onto the sidewalk with his shoulders set and his head up.  If he looked like a victim—

Well.  There was more than enough literature about that.  Half his _life_ was literature about that.

He fought the urge to jam his hands into his pockets, too.  Training his ears on every single fucking sound around him was exhausting; trying to see everything and everyone at once, but to make it look like a casual survey instead of desperate reconnaissance, grated on your nerves like a motherfucker.  Anybody could be anything, right?  Anybody could be watching him from anywhere, as he walked down a row of shopfronts on a tree-lined sidewalk, as the cars puttered by—everything was a fucking hiding space waiting to happen; every single fucking detail gaped with horrid possibility—

He had to get a fucking grip.  Paranoia wasn’t going to save him; it was just going to send him into cardiac arrest long before he ever made it down the road to Roy.

Usually it took him hours of this—or crowds so thick that he had to elbow his way through them just to move—to reach this particular threshold of shaking overstimulation.  Usually he could handle a couple kids shouting here and there; usually he didn’t startle at every scrabble of movement from a knee-level dog that he hadn’t seen; usually the fucking _topiaries_ didn’t feel threatening—

He was such a fucking mess.

He was such a fucking _mess_ , and he meant what he’d said to Marta—he couldn’t ask Roy for help with this.  He couldn’t ask Roy for help with anything right this second; Roy had his own wars to wage and his own damn crucifixes to carry.  Ed had strung himself up on this one—all by his stupid self; in a feat of both physics and anatomy, he’d nailed his own palms to it, and that was his alone to justify.

Even if he said something, Roy might just think it was some kind of symptom of anxiety.  Hell, Roy might think he was _losing_ it.

Besides, he wasn’t about to fuck up this relationship with something so idiotic—not now, when he’d almost forsaken it for good.

What it came down to was that he was the only person responsible for holding himself together.  And he had to get a handle on it quick, because it was only about another quarter-mile to Roy’s office, and even at the looking-everywhere, constantly-recoiling excuse for a pace that he’d taken up, that didn’t give him much more time.

He tried his absolute damnedest to breathe deeply, holding his bag to his chest.  He’d gotten some coffee beans once Marta had finished her cigarette and ushered him back inside; she’d even been charitable enough to head in first and wave him on after her only once she’d canvassed the room to make sure Kimblee hadn’t come back.

There were cutesy little string lights hung in and between all of the trees on this block.  There was a flowerbox just to his right that was exploding with colored petals.  The sky was obnoxiously blue, and the heat had relented surprisingly early for this time of year, and it was a gorgeous fucking day.  He should’ve felt like a million bucks.  Two million.  Enough to buy a house or something.  Enough to buy Roy a dozen new Mustangs; enough to retire from research at the tender age of twenty-six.

He had to focus on that.  If he let Kimblee fucking ruin his life, that meant the bastard had _won_.  No goddamn chance of that—no goddamn way.  He didn’t know who he was trifling with.  Raw nerves and sticking breaths and uncontrollable heartbeat or no, Edward Elric didn’t go down without a fight.

He tightened his arms around his bag until his right shoulder started to tingle ominously, and then he forced himself to relax his grip.  He was a hundred fucking feet away; he could _see_ the front of the building; he could practically make out Roy’s name on the little sign.  Nobody had hailed him; nobody had stopped him; nobody had leapt out of a neatly-trimmed bush with a knife and a cappuccino mustache and tried to cut his throat.  He was going to make it.  He was on the home-stretch.  He was fine.

He quickened his stride a little, tried to settle his bag non-painfully on his right shoulder, gave up and slung it on the left, and narrowly resisted the urge to run the last little span of sidewalk up to safety.

He stopped in the shadow of the overhang, stared hazily at the sign, swallowed a couple times, breathed a couple more, and then pushed his thumb against the button next to Roy’s name.

The sudden, brassy trill of the buzzer noise almost made him jump out of his fucking skin.

Then the intercom crackled, and he held his breath to try to smooth it out before he had to use it.

“Is that you, Ed?” Roy’s voice asked, unmistakable—and distractingly hot—despite the slight distortion.

“Yeah,” Ed said.  He barely sounded tetchy and freaked-out at all.

“Just wanted to be sure,” Roy said, “before I started out with ‘ _Hello, gorgeous_ ’—” This in a fucking deep, resonant, velvety Cary Grant, auditory-sex kind of a voice that instantaneously made Ed’s eyes go wide and his knees go weak.  “—and accidentally delivered it to Sheska’s mother.”

“Jesus fuck,” Ed managed faintly.  “Yeah, be careful where you point that thing.”

Roy laughed richly.  “You want to come up and help me with it?”

“Nah,” Ed said, mustering a little more volume.  “I think I’ll just hang around down here until you’re done.  What do you think, another hour?  I’ll just count the leaves on this tree here.  That’s cool.”

“All right, then,” Roy said mildly.

“All right,” Ed said.

The silence shuddered with static for a second.

“How about if I say ‘please’?” Roy asked.

“You could try it,” Ed said.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Roy breathed, slow and smooth and fucking _deadly_ ; “would you _please_ come up?”

“Fuck,” Ed said with the remaining quarter of his voice.  “Open the damn door.”

He heard Roy laughing softly—but, more importantly, he also heard the latch on the door click open as the bastard hit the switch upstairs.  Apparently he’d finally gotten bored of pushing Ed’s buttons and decided to hit a useful one instead.

Ed shouldered through the door.  His mouth was actually watering.  How fucking embarrassing was that?

Waiting for the elevator was for people who weren’t salivating over their boyfriends, so Ed hoofed it up the stairs in what might well have been record time.

He’d only been in Roy’s office on a couple of occasions, and always during business hours—usually bearing food or a surprise latte or something—when it was populated, and there was bustle and work and noise.  Creeping through the unlocked door into the empty lobby felt sort of… weird.  Sort of forbidden; sort of like he should’ve been whispering.

But then Roy’s silhouette passed across the doorway to his office just past Sheska’s desk, and that was followed by a variety of paper-shuffling sounds, and that made it much less eerie altogether.

One piece of the uncanniness hadn’t gone away—and probably wouldn’t for a long time, if past experience was any gauge.

He felt like he was being watched.  He was expecting Kimblee’s fucking shadow in every corner; he could almost fucking _smell_ the tactfully-faint miasma of fine cologne.  He could practically feel fingertips on the back of his neck.   _I missed you.  I’m not sure why you don’t believe me, Edward; it’s absolutely true.  I’ve done things you may not have agreed with, but have I ever lied?_

He drew a deep breath, let it out slow, and crossed the lobby to Roy’s office, where he leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms.

“So tell me more about how we’re going to make a mess in here,” he said.

Then he blinked down at the unprecedented tumult of files and folders and paperclips and miscellanea strewn across the floor.

“Oh,” he amended.  “You got started without me.”

Roy favored him with a sheepish grin, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans.  “Sorry.  This whole Bradley business has been… well.  It’s been business, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain.”

“You can if you want,” Ed said, and he wasn’t sure if it came through that that part hadn’t been flirting.  “But if you do it in that voice you used a minute ago, I’ll probably pass out.”

Roy donned the intrigued-slash-unbearably-sexy one-arched-eyebrow face, and Ed was… fucked.  Fucked-as-in-doomed, and fucked-as-in-probably-getting-laid-in-T-minus-two-minutes.

_Awesome_.

“You don’t say,” Roy purred, and his hands were back out of his pockets so that his arms were loose, and nobody fucking sauntered like this man did.  He was so fucking suave it was _predatory_ , and Ed had to fight an instinct to back away.  Roy stepped in so close that the first half of the retort that Ed had been composing died in his throat and took his breath with it.  “In that case, we may have to walk a very…” He touched two fingertips to Ed’s chest just above his folded arms and walked them slowly up his chest.  “…very… fine… line.”

Ed swallowed  And swallowed again.  It was fucking difficult with Roy’s hand so close to his throat; it made his skin tingle like _mad_.

“Where are we gonna do it with this tornado all over your office?” he asked, partly—okay, mostly—just to play the smartass card.

Roy grimaced, looking over the disaster area.  Ed had seen the place cluttered before, but this was a whole new level—the kind of level that involved multiple simultaneous piles-of-paperwork Jenga games and pale towers of cream-colored folders, decorated with abstract designs picked out in color-coded Post-It notes.

“I’m afraid I haven’t turned up the one thing I’m looking for,” Roy said.  “I know it’s here… somewhere.”  He gazed around them for a moment before slowly shaking his head.  “ _Hell_.”

“Was that an interjection, or a description?” Ed asked.

“Both, I think,” Roy said.  He was looking abjectly at the portion of the chaos concentrated on the desk, which was sort of unacceptable given that he had been looking extremely non-abjectly at Ed just a second ago.

Something had to be done.

“So what’s this thing you’re trying to find?” Ed asked, tromping as purposefully as possible over to a small city of striated manila spires.

“It’s a folder like one of those,” Roy said.  “It should say ‘Subordinate Roster 2007-2008’ on the front cover.”

“Labeled needle in a labeled haystack?” Ed asked.  He started with the tallest stack, trying to bend the topmost folder so he could look at the one beneath it without actually lifting it aside.

Roy sighed.  “It’s not called interjection-and-description hell for nothing.”

“We should get that on a sign,” Ed said, attempting to flip through the next few folders on the pile.  “Put it over the door.”

“That would be extremely encouraging to clients,” Roy said.  “I could wear red and black every day to drive the point home.  Everyone’s just too comfortable with lawyers these days, after all.”

Ed snickered.

Then he bent over to check the first couple of folders on a lower pile.

A whisper of a footfall on the carpet was his only warning before the palm of Roy’s hand smacked his ass—so sharply and so suddenly that the pain bloomed bright and startling, searingly immediate and bizarrely fucking—

Sweet.

Bizarrely fucking hot underneath the edge of real hurt, and his blood quickened, and his heart leapt up into the back of his throat and quavered—

And he _absolutely_ did not yelp.  Certainly not rather loudly.

“Sorry,” Roy said, and he looked legitimately pained when Ed straightened and whirled on him.  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—was that—?  I should have—asked.  It’s just—you’re just so gorgeous sometimes I—lose my grip on myself a little, and—”

Speaking of grips, Ed got one on his collar, as well as a fistful of shirtfront, and dragged him in to kiss him hard enough that they knocked teeth twice before he managed to bite down on Roy’s bottom lip.

Roy made a soft sound of approval and—judging by the way he smoothed both hands down Ed’s sides, grasped his hips, and immediately tilted their bodies together— _arousal_ in the back of his throat.

Ed’s whole body warmed to that, and heat, as always, rose—drawing him up onto his toes towards Roy, seeking more of him, more contact, deeper, better, harder, _more_ —

He dropped back down to his heels when his breath started to run short—and tightened his grasp on Roy’s shirt, the better to haul him backwards.

“Too bad you made such a mess,” he breathed against Roy’s mouth, looking up through his eyelashes, which probably should’ve been clichéd but made Roy’s eyes widen all the fucking same.  “You could’ve bent me over your de—”

The groan that tore out of Roy’s throat shook him to the fucking core and instantaneously melted every scrap of bone and cartilage in his knees—which was probably a good thing, because Ed's body weight hanging off of Roy’s shirt made it impossible for Roy to reach over and swipe a pile of file folders off of his desktop.  Roy would’ve regretted that later—a lot later, probably.  But still.

“Hey,” Ed cut in with the paltry remains of his voice.  “I got a better idea.”

“There are no better ideas,” Roy said, and the rumble of a _command_ underneath the words made Ed’s spine tighten so swiftly that his nerves sparked all fucking over.  “Fucking you over my desk is the single best idea that ever has been or will be, and I _want_ —” He leaned in, dragged his mouth down Ed’s jaw to his neck, nipped his throat and drank in the inevitable gasp— “You.”

That went to Ed’s head faster than any liquor—any fucking drug—ever could, and he was so much more than just high on it; so much more than just drunk on the sheer fucking prospect of Roy’s affection, attention, _desire_ —

“Nah,” he forced out.  “C’mon.”

Dragging Roy around the corner of the desk was extremely difficult for a lot of reasons—chief among them the fact that Roy didn’t want to be dragged; secondarily, there were stacks of paper fucking everywhere, and Ed didn’t want to topple any of them over; and for bonus points, it was _really_ hard to guide somebody backwards through a file folder obstacle course and make out with them at the same time.

By some combination of small miracles, Ed managed to pull them through the worst of it, pry their joined mouths apart, turn Roy around, and push him down into his extremely expensive-looking leather desk chair.

Startlement flashed across Roy’s face for about a quarter of a second before comprehension swept it away—in favor of a gut-twisting, slow-burning _hunger_.

Ed was going to die.

What a fucking way to go.

He braced one hand on the chair back and climbed up to straddle Roy’s lap, staying up on his knees for a second to give Roy time to slide both hands slowly up the sides of his thighs, over his hips, towards his ribs; and then sank down to settle on top of him with their pelvises crushed together, and Roy’s lips parted to release the single most exquisite fucking _groan_ —

“This is as good as the desk,” Roy panted, and Ed let the heat of it run through him, twisting down around his spine to make him shiver, and his hips hitched in against Roy’s.  “How clever of me,” Roy murmured, both hands sliding painstakingly slowly down Ed’s back, then over the curve of his ass to cup it in both palms, “to date someone so staggeringly brilliant.”

Ed rolled his hips, and was doubly rewarded—first, by the brain-obliterating beauty of the friction; second, by the way Roy’s breath caught, and his hands clenched.  The tingle of his fingertips digging into Ed’s ass was fucking transcendent.

“There are a couple’f things I know how to do,” he managed, hooking one arm around the back of Roy’s neck and trailing the fingertips of his free hand down Roy’s chest.

Roy was grinning.  “I hope I’m one of them,” he said.

Ed leaned in to breathe against his lips, eyes mostly closed.  “As often as fucking possib—”

The door to the lobby opened.

Ed’s fucking blood froze solid; the air roared around his ears, and the breath leapt out of his lungs to leave a cold fucking vacuum in his chest—

Three footsteps, and then silence.

And then Riza— _Riza_ , completely recognizable and perfectly fucking safe—said, “Oh, dear.”

Roy was staring up at Ed—and the dominant emotion on his face wasn’t horror or humiliation; it was _concern_.  Like he knew something was way, way fucking wrong.

He lifted one hand to card it gently through Ed’s hair even as he turned and flashed a blinding grin in the direction of the doorway, which had framed Riza out in the lobby, looking more than a bit unsettled.

“I thought you and Maria were going to her parents’ place,” Roy said.

“We are,” Riza said.  “She’s waiting in the car.  I was coming by for that nice bottle of wine that Clement gave me.”  She quirked an eyebrow, and then a smile.  “If I’d known it was _Bring Your Significant Other to Work for Office Sex Day_ , I would have had her come up.”

“I do so enjoy celebrating the lesser-known holidays,” Roy said.

“Evidently,” Riza said.  She passed out of sight, heading towards her office.  “Well, don’t mind me.  I’ll be out of your way in a second.”

“Quite all right,” Roy said, reaching up as he did to stroke Ed’s bangs back gently.  His smile tilted tentative, and his voice dropped to a whisper.  “Are you?”

Ed tried to shake himself hard enough to break the thin layer of frost that had coated every centimeter of his skin.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I’m fine.”

Roy gave him a cheesy grin and an even cheesier wink.  “Well, I knew you were _fine_.”

Ed made a face at him.

Roy stretched up to kiss the underside of his chin, which was disgusting and delightful in equal measure.

Ed heard a drawer being opened and then pushed shut, and then Riza was walking past the doorway again, waving a bottle of wine and pointedly not looking their direction.

“I’m leaving,” she called.  “Have fun.  But not too much fun.  And clean up after yourselves.”

“You, too!” Roy called back cheerfully.

She shut the lobby door very soundly behind her.

Roy grinned up at Ed, and the embarrassment didn’t stand a fucking chance set against the undisguised, uncontainable, unparalleled heat in his eyes.

“Right,” Roy purred.  “Where were we?”

A part of Ed just wanted to give the fuck up on this moment, on this day; he had been too many parts of himself already—he’d been bittersweet nostalgia faced with fading friends who still cared about him; he’d been animal terror, shot through with adrenaline like lightning, sizzling trenches left barren in its wake.  He’d been dizzyingly in love with the man in front of him; he’d been chagrined and twice-guilty—once for dropping that awkward-bomb on Riza’s morning, and again for making Roy worry about him when it landed.

A part of him was so fucking tired of ricocheting back and forth between such tremendous heights and hollowing lows—surely anybody would have tried to call a time-out by now.

But that wasn’t what you got.

Life was what you got.

For a limited time fucking only.

And all Ed wanted to do with it right this second was to make Roy as happy as he was capable of.

Everything looked a little simpler when you broke it down like that.

He ran his tongue over his upper lip while he pretended to struggle to remember what they’d been in the middle of—and was rewarded, as he’d hoped, by a sharp intake of breath from Roy.  “Oh,” he said.  “I know.  We were just about—” He ground his hips in and down against Roy’s lap, and this breath came with a moan on the tail end.  “— _here_.”

“God,” Roy choked out, and the laugh that stuttered out of him after it set Ed’s nerve endings aflame all over again.  “Ah—yes.  How could I forget?”

  


* * *

  


Because they were on that side of town, they stopped at the Fancy Grocery Store on the way back—that was, Trader Joe’s instead of the regular place; it wasn’t like they ever shopped at the Taj Mahal or some shit.  Not that you could buy food at the Taj Mahal.  Well, you could probably buy food right outside of it; tourist places were usually like that.  Right?  Ed had never even fucking dreamed of going to India; he actually had no damn idea.

The point was, Trader Joe’s wasn’t exactly posh enough to have a doorman and a fleet of butlers to carry your basket for you, or anything, but it was a slightly different experience.  Pinako had occasionally taken them to the one up in town back home—occasionally their produce was actually better-priced than the stuff at the more immediately local little market, so it made sense, and all.  She used to let Ed and Al and Winry each pick out a snack, which had felt extra special because of the way this place slapped ostentatiously quirky-retro packaging on everything and gave all their specialty items funny little names.

“So what would you like to do for dinner?” Roy asked, once they’d forged past a slightly overwhelming display of orchids right next to the door.

“Eat,” Ed said.

Roy gave him a not especially serious sardonic look.  Ed grinned back.

They both looked a little bit… disheveled… from the hanky-panky in Roy’s office earlier.  The satisfied glow and indefatigable hint of a smirk was a good look on Roy, as was the noticeably messy hair and the slightly wrinkled shirt.  Since everything was a good look on Roy, that wasn’t exactly saying anything, but—still.  Worth noting.

“Would you like to be more specific?” Roy asked.

Ed tried very, very hard not to laugh, but you couldn’t win them all.  “Eat… food?”

Roy rolled his eyes.  “You’re going to pay for that.”

“Bite me,” Ed said.

It was Roy’s turn to look unreasonably fucking smug, which was also a good look on him.  Fucking amazing, actually.  But if Ed ever told him that, it was going to become a perpetual thing.

“I believe,” Roy said, “that I already did.  In several places.  With great pleasure.”

Ed did a surreptitious corners-of-the-eyes check for any children who might’ve overheard that en route to finding some kind of quirky-retro munchies to take home.  “Fine,” he said when none were apparent—haha, ap _parent_.  No eavesdropping parents either, fortunately.  “You wanna do… I dunno, maybe if they have something good in the frozen section.  Or did you want to, like, _cook_ -cook?”

Roy grinned at him.  “Please say that again.”

Ed glowered at him.  “Like it’s _my_ fault you f—” Children check.  He lowered his voice for good measure anyway; you could never tell who might be waiting impressionably in the next aisle or whatever shit.  “Like it’s my fault my brain’s scrambled when you’re the one who fucked me on your _desk_ , Mustang.  I think I’m entitled to some fucking ‘cook-cook’.”

“It would be even better if we changed those second Os out for Cs,” Roy said, more than a touch longingly.

Ed would say he’d never met someone who could start talking about having more sex immediately after having _had_ sex, but… Greg had been the worst about wanting more of the thing he was getting at the time.

Roy cleared his throat.  “How about this—why don’t I think about sides, and you can pick a protein?”

“Potatoes,” Ed said.

Roy’s mouth undulated in a hilarious way as he tried to suppress a laugh this time.  “For such a brilliant scientist, you sometimes struggle with simple instructions.”

“On your _desk_ , Roy,” Ed said.  “For an _hour_.”

“I can’t imagine it was more than forty minutes,” Roy said.  “And it sounded like you were enjoying it.”

“That’s not the point,” Ed said.

“What is the point?” Roy asked.  He paused.  “That’s… an honest question.  I think I’ve lost the thread of this conversation entirely.  It’s difficult to keep track when I’m imagining you on my desk.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Me, too.  The point is that I want potatoes.”

Roy sighed, but it was the smiling one.  “In that case, why don’t you choose the sides, and I’ll decide on the meat?”

“Done,” Ed said, starting off towards the most likely place for potato storage.

“Get something green,” Roy called after him.

“We can put chives on them,” Ed called back.  “Chives are green.”

“A _vegetable_.”

Ed paused so they’d only be shouting at each other a quarter of the way across the store, rather than halfway, at the rate they were going.  “Chives are a vegetable.”

“They’re an herb,” Roy said.

“You didn’t say non-herb vegetable,” Ed said.  “You said ‘something green’.”

Roy made a big show of throwing his hands up in the air.

“Desk,” Ed said.  “At _least_ forty minutes.”

Roy looked a lot more amenable to chives after that.

  


* * *

  


Ed—with his arms full of potatoes, and also some butter, because you couldn’t have potatoes with chives without _butter_ , and with a bag of microwaveable frozen edamame on top of his motherlode, because Roy would get all excited about that—had forgotten about the promise of vengeance or whatever by the time he returned to the cart to deposit his prizes.

Apparently Roy hadn’t, since he momentarily arrived holding a cellophane-wrapped package of chicken and a tartan-printed bag that read…

“‘Mini Butterscotch Shortbread Buttons’,” Ed intoned.

He blinked.

He couldn’t even say _That’s it; I’m leaving you_ , because it wasn’t going to be funny for a while yet.

He cast around in his brain for another appropriate response.

“I’m going over to the canned food aisle,” he said.  “To see if they have single servings of whoop-ass.”

“Oh, dear,” Roy said.  “Shall I put these back?  I don’t even know how they got into my hands.  What’s going on in this store?”

“Too late,” Ed said, grabbing them away and tossing them into the cart.  “We’re getting them, and you’re going to deal with the consequences.”

“Do the consequences involve eating them?” Roy asked.  “They look pretty good.”

“I’m going to eat them,” Ed said.  “All of them.  In front of you.  And not let you have any.  As punishment.”

Roy paused, leaning on the handle of their cart.  “When you put it that way, it sounds a bit kinky.”

Ed ramped the glare up from a seven to a nine.  “You’re kinda missing the point of _punishment_ here, Mustang.”

“Am I?” Roy asked blithely.  “I’m so terribly sorry.  May I make it up to you later?”  He leaned in to breathe, with unmistakable intent, into Ed’s ear.  “I have a few ideas about how.”

“Unless they involve making me hot chocolate and serving me shortbread on bended knee and maybe a shoulder massage,” Ed said, “no.”

Roy wilted.  Fortunately, the cart handle was there to break his fall.

“Tough crowd,” Roy said.

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Ed said, but Roy could probably tell that he was trying not to laugh.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI, FRIENDS!  I'm so sorry this is so late… I've been on the Hot Mess Express for a couple weeks running now, and this sucker just doesn't make any stops. XD
> 
> **ALSO:** this is the chapter where there is a LOT of very candid talk about consent. It could be triggering (or perhaps just a bit too close to home) for anyone who's had a relationship in the past where boundaries were pushed and things went badly. If you need a more specific rundown on what gets talked about and where it goes, let me know in a DM somewhere, and I'd be happy to talk through it with you. ♥
> 
> Lesser but connected warning: this one gets REAL emotional in a couple different ways. I had forgotten how much. If you ID with this fic's Ed a lot, you may want to save it until you have time to get through the whole thing. ♥

The trip back from Edinburgh is gorgeous—Britain grants him another gently-gusting, overcast day; even just the walk to the train station feels like a scene out of a lesser-known Doyle story, or like he’s suddenly become a figment of Oscar Wilde’s imagination.  The man with the long, light hair and the wavering stride: one minute he moves quickly; the next he slows down, like he’s trying to carve the skyline of this city deep into the meat of his brain with nothing but the sharp edge of his own determination.

Speaking of Doyle, the second thing Ed does when he’s stumbled back into London proper—after dropping his bags off at another cheap, albeit not-especially-purple, hotel—is sidle onto the Tube towards Baker Street, so that he can go buy Elicia a deerstalker hat at the source.  She can wear it while she takes photos or something and create a little bit of instant shade.  Her lens’ll probably extend too far for it to be much use, but all the same…

The flight that he booked to D.C. grants him an extra day and a half here—an extra day and a half with nothing planned and nothing paid for.  After a few hours of wandering the streets, instinctively looking the wrong way for traffic, he knows what he wants to do with it.

A part of him wants to go see a show—fuck knows if _anything_ ’ll still be selling tickets for the night of, let alone the Globe or one of the good musicals or something.  It’d be nice, in a way, to bask in a spectacle and try to lose himself in somebody else’s imaginary drama.  It’d be nice to pretend to forget his own for a while.

But the rest of him just wants to… be.

To be _here_.

To breathe it in; to listen close enough to identify some of the thousand languages that flow across its tongue; to watch the shadows lengthen and the lights come on; to hear its heartbeat lap against cement and stone embankments under bridges from a dozen separate universes merging in the Thames.

So he just… walks.

He walks past Shakespeare’s theater; past the Pizza Express next to it; past several pubs and more than several chain coffee shops, only a few of which his country of origin is responsible for.  He walks across London Bridge, moves vaguely in the direction of the diamond-egg building; wanders off and ends up at the Monument to the Great Fire.  He remembers something he saw flipping through one of the guidebooks and heads west.  Apparently the minor miracle of directional capacity—or perhaps just sheer dumb luck—is with him today, because he wends his way over to Saint Dunstan’s without losing his way once.

The moment he steps inside the walls, it’s like the whole damn city falls away.

He can still _see_ it—buildings tower on every side; there’s brick and the bright gleam of tenement windows just beyond the arches and the spire.

But it’s different, in here.

Ivies he couldn’t hope to name climb and cross the weathered stone; moss spreads like emerald contagion; and the trees have grown so broad and tall that there’s almost nowhere without shade.  Damp leaves litter the ground, muffling his steps as he crosses to a wooden bench and sits.

Roy would love it here.

He’s almost reluctant to fish out his camera—reluctant to breach the sanctity of the silence of this place—but if he doesn’t photograph it, he’s not sure he’ll be able to convince himself that it exists.

He takes a few pictures as the slant of the sunbeams shifts, and deepens, and crisps at the edges into gold.

He’s going to be all right.

  


* * *

  


Naturally, the fake snark thing didn’t even hold up all the way home, because Roy asked about what Ed was working on, and translating the bizarre fragments of thoughts filling the science side of his brain into relatively comprehensible layperson’s terms monopolized Ed’s attention too much for him to be an asshole at the same time.  Roy probably knew it.  That was probably his plan all along.

But whatever.

The bottom line was that Roy got positively giddy opening the edamame, and then put salt on them, because it was “traditional, Edward… traditional _here_ , anyway, at my dining table, because I said s—don’t laugh when I’m trying to make you eat your vegetables,” and then there was chicken and also potatoes, and Ed wanted the record to show eternally that the chives were extremely nutritious.  And then they got close enough together on the couch that an individual who did not recognize the nuances of their contact might accuse them of cuddling, and Ed tried to grind his way through some grant application reviews, because he really needed to get on the good sides of most of the other people on the committee.  He also savored finally getting to explain to Roy that his other project, which involved some major updates to a textbook chapter that Izumi had written ages ago, was almost entirely motivated by the fact that the credit line would amount to “Educational Edition Edited by Edward Elric”—that was, _Edu. Ed. Ed. by Ed_.

Roy—bless every fucking organ in his meatbag but the heart especially—thought that was just as fucking excellent as Ed did.

So that was good.  Even working too much on a Sunday night—that was so, so, so damn good.

  


* * *

  


Ed always let Roy do his bajillion bathroom things first when they were getting ready to go to sleep, because it just sort of made more sense for one of them to warm up the bed while the other fussed around with exfoliator this and six kinds of floss and whatever else it was Roy did in there when left to his own devices.  It usually gave Ed a head start on stealing all the blankets, too, which was a huge tactical advantage in the bedtime war.

Then Roy emerged, triumphant and scrubbed and whatever all it was, and then they switched places, and Ed flossed and tied his hair up and peed and splashed a little bit of water on his face, and then he got to climb back into a warm bed where Roy was getting all comfortable, and that was pretty hard to beat.

He was trying not to think about the fact that he’d almost pushed this out of his own life for good.  With the best of intentions, yes, and he still agreed with his own reasoning to a certain extent, but _still_ —

“Your thoughts are deafening,” Roy said, stroking his hair back.  It was just dark enough that the shadows softened all the lines of his face, but Ed could still distinguish the shape of his eyes and the bridge of his nose and the tilt of his smile.  “Anything you want to share, or is it all complicated science genius?”

The last thing Ed wanted to do was dredge up the same old shit and start an argument about it.

“Nah,” he said.  “I’m good.”

“May I share one?” Roy asked.

“A what?” Ed asked.  “A science genius?  I’m not sure I’m up for polyamory with another scientist; you might have to settle for m—”

“A thought,” Roy said.  “You smartass.”

“I’m gonna take that as a compliment,” Ed said.

“As it was intended,” Roy said.

And then he waited.  Like it fucking mattered that Ed gave him the go-ahead—like it made a difference to him if Ed granted him permission to speak his mind, because Ed’s feelings about what he said were just as important as his desire to say it.

Fuck.

“Sorry,” Ed said.  “What’s your thought?”

“Why are you sorry?” Roy asked, but his hesitation didn’t quite last long enough for Ed to zero in on the reason in the first place, let alone to decide whether or not it was too embarrassing to articulate, let alone to figure out how to use stupid-ass words to explain it if it wasn’t humiliating.  “I… it just occurred to me—after what’s happened with… in the past few weeks.  I was thinking that it’s become something of an instinct for me to keep a lot of the communication that usually goes into a relationship to myself—not all of it, certainly; I think we’ve done a lot of things very, very right, and I can’t imagine that that won’t continue.  But some of… some of the things that should come from my side… don’t.  And I think that’s because in the past, I’ve felt, or intuited—or sometimes outright been told, in so many words, not especially gently—that when I pinpoint what I like and what I’m grateful for, it makes me sound… needy.  Or like I expect those things, whatever they are.  Like I feel entitled to them, or that by describing them, I’m demanding them in the future.  And that’s not the point, not at _all_ , but… I think I internalized that, to some extent.  Now, though—I want to find a way to start freeing those feelings again, because I think you need to hear them.”

Ed ran his tongue along the backs of his teeth—not because he was bad at brushing them, whatever that traitor _Al_ liked to say, but to give himself another second to fumble for some words.

“I don’t need anything,” he managed.  “I mean—I like everything the way it is.  Everything’s great.  You’re great; you’re _always_ great; I don’t want you to change things just ’cau—”

“It’s not changing,” Roy said softly.  “It’s just… revealing.  It’s addressing things I already feel—which I’m normally averse to facing directly, but in this case I _want_ you to know.  It might be good for both of us.  And I think it would help you to understand that this isn’t just…” He smiled.  “This isn’t just about me, Ed.  This isn’t about me giving lavishly and feeling unappreciated or something like that.  This isn’t… it’s not uneven at all.  I’d—suspected, sometimes, that you felt that way, and what you said when… Some of the things you said the other night made it fairly evident that—”

“I’m not asking for anything,” Ed said.  “I don’t need anything other than just—” He reached out to curl his fist in the front of Roy’s pajama shirt.  Hopefully Roy would get that that was supposed to be semi-metaphorical and refer either to Roy as a whole, or to the heart specifically, rather than meaning, like, _All I need from life is tagless Hanes cotton T-shirts_ followed by a cheesy commercial jingle or some shit.  “This.  That’s is all I fucking want.  It’s okay.”

“I sleep better when I’m with you,” Roy said.  His hand lifted past Ed’s, and his fingertips skated across Ed’s cheek.  “You make me laugh like no one I’ve ever met.  I _know_ you’re listening to me—no matter what I’m saying; no matter how trivial or ridiculous it is.  I know you’re listening, and I know you care.  I know that even if I say something very stupid that you fundamentally disagree with, you’ll still respect me after I’ve said it.  I know that trust doesn’t come easily to you anymore, and I know that despite that, you have fought with your own instincts to make a home here, and you have tried to give me the best of yourself in every way that you can.  These aren’t ordinary things, Ed.  I think you feel like they are, sometimes; I think you take everything that you’re capable of—all the wonderful things that come naturally to you—for granted, because you don’t think that anything about you is extraordinary.  And that _is_ something I fundamentally disagree with.  You have let me in even when you were terrified to do it, and you have let me be so safe with _you_ that the world simply isn’t as cold as it used to be.  And that’s all I want—for us to be like that, and be able to do that for each other.  But I want to acknowledge it, too, for precisely what it is, so that you can hear all of the little things it means and encompasses when I say things like _I love you_.  There’s a mountain of little gifts behind it, Ed.  There is an entire universe full of stars you _gave_ to me, and I want you to know that I’ve counted them, over and over; and that they matter; and that I care; and that every single day I am grateful for every single one.”

Ed swallowed.

He swallowed again.

He swallowed a third time.

“Sorry,” Roy said softly.  His fingertips fluttered down along Ed’s jaw and danced across his collarbones, hovering near the base of his neck like they could sense the knot stopping Ed’s speech.  “Are you all right?”

“That was a—” Ed made a valiant attempt to clear his throat.  “That was a complicated thought.”

“Ah,” Roy said, sounding vaguely chagrined, “I may have shared… more than one.  It was a bit of a chain reaction.”

“Jeez,” Ed said.  “It was friggin’ Chernobyl.”

For some variety, he swallowed one more time.  And then he mustered up some guts.

“But I hear you,” he said.  “And—thank you.  And I—love you—too.  Obviously.  A lot.  Enough that it—kind of freaks me out, I guess; this… week’s… been—just, y’know, my whole life’s been… ‘Don’t try to grab anything you can’t afford to lose again’, and Al’s the only exception I ever thought I was gonna get.  So it just seems like a fucking natural law that it couldn’t… that it couldn’t be as big for you as it is for me, because that’s never how it _works_.  Getting something this good feels like I’m cheating.  Like I’ve got to be taking advantage of something, and I’m gonna get my ass kicked for it somewhere down the line.”

“Well,” Roy said, warmly, and Ed could see the curving lines of the broadening grin even in the dark, “why wouldn’t relationships follow Newton’s third law of motion?”

Ed stared at the dim contours of his face.

And then Ed grabbed him by the hair and the T-shirt collar and kissed him, hard.

When they parted, panting, Roy’s eyes gleamed slightly wild in the half-light, and he was still grinning.

“I’m going to have to brush up on my basic science,” he said, “so that I can seduce you with physics references _all_ the time.”

“Please do,” Ed said.

“You may have to recommend me some reading,” Roy said.

“That’s even sexier,” Ed said—completely seriously, because this was some serious shit, and anyone who didn’t understand that could shove it, and might want to keep in mind that force was equal to mass times acceleration.

Roy wrapped him into a hug.  “I adore you,” he said.  “I do.  I mean it.  With everything I’ve got.  And in light of that, perhaps I should also let you get some sleep.”

“You’re just trying to get out of the late-night physics primer,” Ed said.

“I think it would be easier to digest over breakfast,” Roy said.  “Pun entirely intended.”

“Nerd,” Ed said.

Roy kissed his forehead.  “I am not going to respond to that, because starting an infinite feedback loop isn’t the best idea right at bedtime.”

Ed suppressed the sudden and extremely unfair urge to yawn.  “Is this your way of telling me to go to sleep?”

“I know better than to _tell_ you to do anything,” Roy said.  “But it might be a wise suggestion made purely in the interests of your well-being.”

“G’night to you, too,” Ed said.

It was really hard to stay fake-mad when Roy was smiling like that, and then carding one gorgeous hand through Ed’s hair, and then kissing him again.

  


* * *

  


Monday was a mixed bag, as Mondays usually were—the centrifuge didn’t _explode_ , exactly, but there were some sparks, and one of them burned Paola’s arm a little, and Ed started digging through the endless legalese of the worker’s comp shit even though she promised him that she was fine.  And then the department sent an email letting him know they were giving him funding for a research associate, which was fucking great.  And then Rosé texted _Hey Ed!!  You can’t get out of it, unless of course you changed your number and this is someone who is not Ed.  But if it is, how’s Friday at the little crepe place on Oxford around 12??_

He read _creep place_ at first, which made his stomach do weird shit, but other than that—

_sure sounds awesome and 12 works for me.  see you then, looking forward to it!_

He’d felt since the moment he met Rosé Thomas that there was a significant and detrimental dearth of exclamation points in his life.  She had that effect on people.  Winry did the same thing, but her style somehow made the punctuation mark vaguely threatening instead of excited and cute.

Maybe that was Rosé’s secret.  Maybe it had been all along.  Maybe the thing that was missing from Ed’s blackened, selfish little soul was an effort to inject exclamatory joy into every statement.  Maybe it was like smiling was sometimes, where once you started going through the motions, it worked backwards and made your brain feel happier simply because you were executing the physical actions that usually accompanied happiness.

Or maybe there were people in the world who weren’t just natural-born fucking buzzkills, like he’d been from day one, or possibly day two.  To be fair, he probably hadn’t been too good at buzzkilling until he was at least a little bit verbal, although odds were decent that he’d accomplished quite a lot of it armed just with a small variety of obnoxious baby noises.

The point was, he was honestly looking forward to lunch with Rosé, even if she was a superhuman freak who genuinely appreciated life despite spending most of hers directly facing how shitty the world was.  That took a special kind of person—not that he hadn’t figured that from the fact that she was capable of the witchcraft commonly known as _latte art_ , but… still.  She was amazing.  And she was the kind of amazing who spread the amazingess around her instead of shining so brightly that you felt all the duller in comparison.

In the meantime, though, he had a lot of hiring to do.

And a lot of experiments.

Just not with the demon-centrifuge.

  


* * *

  


He’d been using his phone as a calculator—he’d had a calculator when he was in Izumi’s lab; he _knew_ he had; he just had no idea where it had ended up—and set it on the benchtop next to an ever-increasing quantity of pages of scrawled, sprawling calculations.  A text message sent it jittering across the surface like a huge, terrifying insect, startling him out of his science trance—and Paola out of hers, based on the half-stifled gasp that emanated from her direction.

He glanced up at the clock on the wall instead of down at the timestamp on the phone, because… whatever.  He sort of liked that clock for some reason.  Old-school.  With hands and shit.

It was just after six.

Then the cold thoughts started to dribble down his spine—who the fuck was it _from_?  It could be Roy, sure; it could be Al, or Win, or someone from the insurance company who thought they were chummy enough to text instead of calling now, or Rosé, or…

Or it could be Kimblee.

And Paola might get to see a couple of pixels on a screen reduce her fucking PI to a helpless, sniveling wreck.

He cleared his throat before the walls of it could start to stick to each other, before his breath could start to catch—before the panic could close the clawed hands around his lungs and squeeze until he _suffocated_ —

And he snatched the phone up and looked at the name on the screen.

_Roy Mustang_.

Fuck.  And thank fuck.  And maybe Roy would be amenable to fucking later on, not least to try to help to clear this haze of unarticulated horror out of Ed’s stupid head.

_Hi, you, hope the science is science-ing admirably.  I’m about to leave the office -- am I likely to have the unrivaled pleasure of your company for dinner, or shall I save something and keep it warm for you for later? <3_

Ed blinked up at the clock, and then down at his work, and then sideways-down at the phone.

“Shit,” he said.  He looked over at Paola, who was rubbing her eyes, which made him want to do the same thing.  “What the heck are you still doing here, kid?”

He needed to stop calling her that.  She was a couple months older than him.  Plus if she took him to HR, she could probably get his ass fired for shit like that.

Too late now, though.

She grinned at him, albeit wearily.  “Working?” she said.  “Seemed like it for a while, at least.  Not as sure about the last few hours.”  She gestured to her notes.  “I’m not entirely confident that I know what this means anymore.”

“I hear that,” Ed said.  “Hey.  Go home.  Get some rest.  Think about something else for a while.  Something nice.  Like puppies.”

Paola stood up and stretched.  “Does it have to be puppies?  Usually I prefer kittens.”

“My brother would love you,” Ed said.  “Fill in fluffy baby animal of choice.  Or, like, reality TV.  Whatever you want.”

“Hard to say no to that,” Paola said as she reached for her bag and started rummaging through it.  “Are you going home?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “I’m fried.  And so hungry that saying ‘fried’ makes it worse.”

Paola laughed—and she had a great fucking laugh, and no mistake; it was _full_ , and it always made whatever room she was in seem smaller and warmer the instant she unleashed it.  “Do you need a snack for in the car?  I think I have one.”

“Nah,” Ed said.  “Just bein’ melodramatic.  You want me to give you a ride, though?”

He had a little bit of an ulterior motive, which was that he was always secretly fucking terrified that she was going to end up as one of those bike accident statistics, because that shit _happened_ , and people _died_ , and she was a fine scientist and a wonderful person, and he didn’t figure he was going to be able to do any of this without her.  As far as strokes of luck in his life went, this one was poised and waiting for the other fucking shoe to fall to start with, and then this girl had to go and ride a crappy little bike home through a nasty part of town every single day.

“I’m all right,” she said.  “Thank you.”  He must have had some stupid look on his face that was betraying him, because she smiled and added, “Really, Ed.”

“Okay,” he said.  “If you’re sure.”

He walked her to the bike rack anyway, under the guise of it being en route to the parking lot, which it wasn’t.  But that was okay; he’d work up an appetite with the detour.

He texted Roy as he looped around the stats building to circle back to the tree-grove-lined path towards the actual location of the garage.   _i’m on my way to the car - i would love to eat with you like real civilized people haha.  don’t text back if you’re driving!  see you soon_

His brain had been whirring so vigorously all day that it wasn’t even until he was shoving his phone into his pocket that he registered the intermittent sounds behind him as—footsteps.  Maybe.  He didn’t know; he couldn’t be sure; sometimes leaves just sort of… crunched… on their own… and there was a little bit of a breeze, and even if it _was_ someone, it was probably a starving grad student finally straggling out of lab in search of food, or an undergrad off to some extracurricular, or a night-shift service person, or—

Or Soph Kimblee with a fucking knife.

Could have been anyone, really.

Or could have been nothing at all.

And his stupid fucking animal brain and even stupider fucking animal endocrine system never, _ever_ managed to differentiate between the two.

His heart started to pound, and his mind started to race, and his fingertips went clammy-cold, and his breath snagged in his throat every time he tried to move it.  He didn’t know; he didn’t know _anything_ ; probably it was just—probably it was just some other sad sack at this university trying to get home—

But he could distinguish the individual fucking steps now.  There really was somebody behind him; he knew that much for sure.  And they were walking at the exact same speed he was—at the exact same fucking cadence, so that they never got any closer, and he never pulled any further away.

Didn’t take a fucking genius to find that suspicious, did it?

But he couldn’t prove it unless he looked, and if he looked, he lost the Schrödinger’s benefit of the doubt, and if it _was_ fucking Kimblee all the way out here—

What?

What the fuck would he do?

Run?

That was about his only option, given that the most dangerous thing in his laptop bag was a ballpoint pen—which you could do some fucking damage with if you were serious about it, but Kimblee was a _monster_ , so there was no guarantee his skin was even penetrable with ordinary human implements.  It might take a silver bullet, or a spear anointed with holy water or some shit.

Ed tried really, really fucking hard to take a deep breath and listen intently to the impact of the individual footfalls on the ground—like maybe he could hear the quality of the shoes, and if they sounded distinctly like beat-to-crap sneakers, he’d at least have that to go on.  But his heart was too loud—too loud; too violent; too fucking desperate—

He was almost to the other side of the stupid, picturesque little _murder trail_ that the university had for some reason felt compelled to include at this otherwise mostly reasonable institution.  He could see the proper fucking streetlamps on the other side; he could see the corner of the mechanical engineering lab that was the last building between this route and the parking garage.  He could practically see fucking stars in front of his eyes from the lack of oxygen as his breath tried to squeeze past the knot of panic in his throat and consistently fucking failed—

And it was stupid, wasn’t it?  It was stupid to think he’d be any safer on the other side of the trees; it was stupid to think he’d be safe anywhere.  It was stupid to think location mattered.  It was stupid to think he could hide.

Not from Kimblee.  Not from this feeling—not from the needle-clawed clambering of the terror in his chest, up his esophagus, swelling in the back of his mouth and poisoning his weak, weak little brain.

Maybe Roy was right.  Maybe Roy was right, and he had a fucking _problem_ ; maybe it wasn’t just—standard-issue nerves; maybe it wasn’t just him being particularly shit at coping with ordinary human emotions.  Maybe there was something in him that wasn’t right.

And maybe it was killing him.

Then again—

Then a-fucking- _gain_ —

He took five full steps out onto the open concrete once he reached the end of the pathway—far enough to be well clear of the trees, on flat pavement, where he could bolt at a second’s impetus, faster than anyone behind him might expect.

And he turned on his heel too swiftly for someone to get aw—

The whole damn path was empty.

Except for maybe— _maybe_ —a silhouette at the very end, blending into the shadows—a tall, lean figure with a long ponytail—

He had to be imagining it.  That was the paranoia talking—screaming, really; that was the paranoia hurling breakables at him, and at the walls, and banging pots and pans together, and maybe—

It fucking couldn’t be.

It just—couldn’t.

How the fuck would Kimblee know?  Sure, the asshole was richer than he had any right to be; he could probably drop whatever other crap he had going on and hang around the campus for a couple hours whenever he wanted.  But he did have a life.  And there was no fucking way he could _know_ when Ed was likely to be around.  Ed’s schedule was erratic at best, and inexplicable the rest of the time.  _He_ didn’t even know when he was likely to leave the lab most nights.

The stats building had a set of stairs in the front.  Ed forced his shaky knees to keep carrying him for long enough to reach them, then grabbed onto the bronze banister and eased himself down onto the steps as gently as he could.

He was fine.  He was going to be fine.  It was nothing.  If it wasn’t definitively some sort of nightmare-world worst-case scenario, it had to be nothing.

Simple.

  


* * *

  


Also simple was the flood of relief that went through him when he let himself into the house, and there was a light on in the kitchen, and the sound of Roy’s voice floating outward from the doorway was warmer by half than the homey yellow glow of it.

“Hope Chinese sounds edible,” it said.  “It was on the way home, and I was trying to follow your instructions not to t…” He peeked around the doorway where Ed was attempting to kick off his shoes.  “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  He couldn’t even remember the first time he’d lied about how he felt to somebody with good intentions—a little lie, and a kind one, but the trappings didn’t change the thing it was.  Was he a natural at this shit, or was it all the practice?  “Just a long-ass day.”  He finally managed to wedge a toe in against the heel of one boot well enough to pry it off, so once he set his bag down next to it, both hands were free for running them really gently up Roy’s chest and tracing a fingertip along the circle under his right eye.  “Doozy for you, too?”

“A bit of one,” Roy said.  His hands flirted with Ed’s waist, and then he leaned his forehead against Ed’s with both eyes closed for a long second before he even went in for the nauseatingly sweet little hello kiss.  “When I finish this damn case, can we take a vacation?  Somewhere hopelessly romantic and extremely remote, perhaps?”

“How remote are you thinking?” Ed asked.  “Like, the Bahamas?  Or, like, some sandbar in a strait off of Iceland?”

“Don’t care,” Roy said.  “Anywhere I get you all to myself.”

Ed tried to ignore the way his heart seemed intent on sinking—slow but ineluctable.  A descent like a sunset fading past the jagged edge of the horizon.

“It’s going to be a little while before I can take a lot of time off,” he said.  “There’s—I mean, getting the lab rolling is gonna be… it’s so much bigger than I thought.  And it’s sort of… I mean, it’s political, too; if people think I’m not available, it’s like… and I’d trust Paola to run shit, but it’s not really fair to her, and—”

“Edward,” Roy said softly, and Ed didn’t have much choice but to meet his eyes.  They shouldn’t have been able to radiate fucking warmth when they were so dark—the same damn dark as all the shit out there that was _after_ him.  “Anywhere I get you all to myself.  Here counts.  The beach counts.  A restaurant.  The bed.  The couch.  Any time you feel comfortable taking a day—just one; one’s more than enough—do it.  And we can drop everything and take a break just for a couple of hours.  What do you think?”

“I think you’re fucking amazing,” Ed said, which was absolutely true.  “And I think I’m starving.”

“One of those things is debatable,” Roy said, turning and shifting his arm in one smooth movement so that it ended up draped around Ed’s shoulders, the better to tug him towards the kitchen.  “And one of them we can fix.”

“I don’t want to fix your amazingness,” Ed said.  “I like you that way.”

Roy paused.  He stared.  Ed stared back.

“Shit,” Ed said.  “You should’ve warned me at the beginning that the sap was contagious.”

“And foiled my own evil master plan?” Roy asked.  He was about a vocal half-step away from purring like a happy cat.  “I think not.  Should we start with fried rice or chow mein?”

“Yes,” Ed said.

  


* * *

  


“Who should we thank for the blessing that is Friday morning?” Roy asked as they were both fumbling to collect all of their shit without dropping coffee mugs, while also attempting to shove their shoes on at the door.

“Mixed blessing,” Ed said.  “Last day of work and shit, but still a day of work.  And you and I are both fucking addicts who take hits all weekend anyway.”  On second thought—or maybe second and a half; he hadn’t had any of that coffee yet—that was probably not a good road to venture down quite this early.  “Thank the Gregorians,” he said, which was about as graceful a segue as any he’d ever made.  “They’re responsible for the concept of a week.”

Roy blinked at him, but in an interested way, instead of while recoiling back from Ed’s emanating nerdery.  “Where did you pick that up?”

“Insomnia documentary hour,” Ed said.  “Hours plural, usually.  Had a really rough stretch after the whole—” Nope, not letting his breath tighten; not today.  “—Kimblee thing, so I ended up going through, like, the entire available opus of the History Channel once I ran out of decent science shit.”

“Every time I turn around,” Roy said, and Ed rose up into the toothpaste-tasting kiss on pure instinct—not that he had to rise far, obviously; not that there were tiptoes involved, or anything; “you are somehow even more wonderful than yesterday.”

“Too early for concentrated schmoop,” Ed said.  It wasn’t an especially defensible position given how eagerly he’d dived into the kiss and all, but hopefully it was also too early for Roy to call him out on that flaw in his logic.  “Hey, I’m having lunch with Rosé, from the coffee shop.”

Roy’s hand skimmed down Ed’s back before it fell away to start gathering up the lawyerly accoutrements by the door.  “The one who made the oxytocin mug, right?”

And it was unreasonable—it was _unfair_ —how much the simple fact that Roy paid real-ass fucking attention to everything that Ed said made Ed’s heart fucking weak for him.

“Yeah,” he said, instead of falling to his knees and delivering an ode or some shit, which was basically the other option.  “She’s really cool.”

“She seems it,” Roy said.  He opened the door and held it so that they could start the brief and uneventful parade out to their respective cars.  “That’s excellent.  I hope you have a nice time.”

“Thanks,” Ed said.  “Have a good day, okay?”

Roy tipped their heads together, then beeped the locks on his car.  “You, too, sweetheart.”

  


* * *

  


Fridays were supposed to be the opposite of Mondays, right?

Fancy that.  Ed was doing shit backwards again.

This time, the centrifuge _did_ explode.

In fairness, it wasn’t exactly nuclear-reactor-scale shit—the blast was all internal, and the casing on the machine pretty much contained it, but there was _fire_ , and then there were fire _alarms_ , and then there was a very blurry hour of standing outside clutching his laptop to his chest and babbling about the lead-up to a couple of firefighters who weren’t especially interested in the details of his experiments and probably wished he’d gone up in flames with the damn thing.  Eventually, both the firefighters and the building facilities group cleared Ed and poor Paola—who probably wished she was still in Brazil working long-distance, if she deigned to keep putting up with Ed and his shit luck in that fantasy at all—to go back into the lab.

The whole place smelled like smoke and burnt plastic even after they flung all the windows open and propped the door out with a bulk-sized box of nitrile gloves.  Ed sort of wanted to use the wreckage of the centrifuge as a doorstop instead, but he wasn’t sure he was feeling brave enough to touch the demon-machine just yet.  At least the sprinklers hadn’t gone off and soaked all of their paperwork.

It took Paola about fifteen minutes to get a migraine.  Which was fine, because by the time Ed locked up and then drove her to her place, he remembered that he had a reason to keep track of the time, and—

It was twelve fifteen.

Of course it was.

He pulled over into some random cul-de-sac near Paola’s place and texted Rosé the apology of the century, including an offer to buy her lunch, reschedule, or both as she saw fit.  Fortunately, he got an instantaneous response indicating that she wasn’t in a hurry, and she was sitting outside at a lovely little table outside with flowers and stuff, and she didn’t mind waiting at all.

At least fucking something was going right.

Up until he tried to park, anyway.

Long story shortened, he straggled up to her, panting from the lengthy speed-walk, at twelve thirty-eight.

“Holy shit,” he managed.  She jumped up from the table to hug him, and he kept rambling even as she drew away.  “Sorry, I’m so sorry; it’s been—there was—”

“Is that a bruise?” Rosé asked, gesturing to a place on her cheek and then pointing towards his.  “Are you okay?”

Ed reached up and rubbed at the spot she’d indicated.  His hand came away gray.

“Nah,” he said.  “Soot.”  He held it out for inspection, because it seemed like a good idea to his stupid brain.  “There was a fire in my lab.”  At her horrified expression, he amended, “Small fire!  Just a piece of equipment.  It sort of blew up.  Nobody got hurt.  Except my grad student got a migraine, so I took her home.  But that’s all just—no excuses.  I’m sorry, I really meant to be… on-time, at least, Jesus.”

“It’s _fine_ ,” Rosé said, sitting down again and pushing his chair out with her foot.  “Take a load off, Ed; you look like you had a heck of a week even before the ‘small fire’.”

“Kinda,” Ed said, trying for a rueful grin as he dropped into the offered chair.  “But—hell, tell me about you.”

“Oh, gosh,” Rosé said.  She was the only person Ed had ever met—well, ever met and _liked_ —whose staunch refusal to swear rivaled even Al’s.  The liking part probably came from the fact that, in both of those cases, the cursing abstinence was an informed personal decision, and it never carried any judgment on other people’s informed personal decisions to drop F-bombs like confetti on New Year’s Eve.  “Well, I finished up that degree I was working on in adolescent psychology, and then I got this amazing job doing counseling at the crisis center, and it’s just…” Her eyes were like gemstones held up to the light.  “It’s exactly what I was always hoping for, you know?”

“You’ve always been really good at helping people,” Ed said.  “And you’ve always been really easy to talk to, which I bet goes a long way in a job like that.”

She beamed at him.  Holy fuck, complimenting people was awesome sometimes.  “Well—I try, anyway.  And it’s so _great_ , Ed—because we do a lot of, you know, regular counseling and advising and life-coaching sort of stuff, and that’s really important.  There just isn’t any feeling in the entire world like seeing somebody leave standing taller than they did when they walked in, because you helped them realize that they have the power to decide what their future’s like.  Or because you got them to understand that they’re worth so much more than what they’ve been told in the past, or what they started to believe, or… And all of that’s amazing, but we do a lot of outreach, too—so we’re going to schools a lot and doing little sessions with teenagers and college students about affirmative consent.”

Ed… hesitated.

And Rosé saw it, and waited for him, so he had to say it despite the rather-more-than-negligible misgivings.

He cleared his throat.  “Isn’t that… kind of…”

Shit.  He had no idea how to finish that without sounding like a piece of shit.

“Redundant?” she asked, and it was obvious she’d expected that this whole time—but there wasn’t a single trace of condescension in her voice, which was what he’d been tensing for, so at least there was that.

“I mean,” he managed, “I guess.  Yeah.”

“That’s what most people think,” she said.  “And I understand why, too.  You know, the people who come in… mostly women, but not always—pretty much everybody understands that if someone else wants sex, and you say ‘no’, and they force you, that’s rape.”  She sat back a little, smiling kind of sadly.  “But what a lot of people don’t get is that you _always_ have the right to say ‘no’.  And that not saying ‘no’ doesn’t mean you’re saying ‘yes’.”

Ed had to think about that for a second.  And he had to think about how to express reservations without sounding like he was endorsing abuse, which—wasn’t what he was _doing_ , but—

“I mean,” he said, “of course it doesn’t, but—there are situations where… I mean, if you’re in a relationship with someone—”

“You can still say ‘no’,” Rosé said, and there was something in her eyes that he couldn’t look away from—not judgment, exactly; not indictment; nothing… bad.  But something that made his skin feel just a little bit too tight.  “That’s one of the things we’re trying to teach—and it’s hard; it’s hard to wrap your head around.  There’s this culture we’ve built that’s just so… we have all of these very deeply-ingrained ideas about what’s expected of us in these contexts, and taking a step back isn’t easy.  And if you read it the wrong way—which a lot of people do—affirmative consent sounds like ‘You have to ask someone for verbal permission every time you want to touch them or kiss them or _anything_ , or they’ll accuse you of sexual violence’, and that’s not what it’s about.  That’s not it at all.  It’s about creating a different culture around sex where everyone feels safe expressing themselves; and people only have sex because they actively _want_ to, rather than because they feel like they have to; or because they feel like they should; or because what’s being asked now is something that they did once in the past, even if they don’t want to do it anymore.  Prior consent isn’t perpetual consent.  Previous experience isn’t consent.  Silence isn’t consent.  Capitulation isn’t consent.  And those things seem like they should be self-explanatory, but so many of us feel trapped, or pressured, or guilty, and it shouldn’t have to be like that.  It’s just that we should all take care of each other—we should all be able to express what we want when we want it, and we should feel safe speaking up if and when we’re asked to do things that we don’t want.  _That’s_ what the movement means.”

Ed knew, rationally, that they were sitting in the sunlight.  He could see it gleaming off of Rosé’s hair; she was wearing a pretty little silver necklace that kept catching sparks of it.  He knew it was warm.  He knew there were prickles of sweat on the small of his back from how fast he’d walked over.

But all of a sudden, he felt so fucking _cold_.

“Ed?” Rosé said.

Her hand on his arm shook him out of it—pretty fucking literally; he felt himself shiver once, sharply, like he’d gotten an actual fucking chill.

“Sorry,” he said, fighting the rasp impinging on the edge of his voice.  “I was just—thinking.  Sorry.  That’s really… it’s really great.  And really interesting.  I never—really thought about it like that.”

“Ed,” she said again, and her fingers curled closer around his wrist, and her eyes were big and full of—worry?  “This… guy—the guy you’re with, the lawyer guy—”

A part of him wanted to jerk away from her grip at the very fucking implication—which was a shitty thought, and a shittier feeling, because his guts bottomed out at the suggestion itself and then somehow dropped further and twisted sickly once it occurred to him how awful that gesture would make her feel—

“No,” he got out.  “ _God_ , no; no way.  Not Roy.  Jesus.  He’s—great; he’s—I mean, thinking about it, he… does all that stuff.  Not necessarily, like, waiting for a spoken confirmation of every single thing, but—like you said, he’s really—I think he gets that.  It’s—”

It was the incomprehensible depth of the shadow that he’d dared to think he’d finally left behind.  It was the almost-imaginable, almost-deniable, tinglingly faint press of its fingers on his throat.

It was the whiplash reevaluation—the retrospect.  It was his brain trying to grind through all those fractured memories and sort out which shards were true, let alone relevant, let alone _different_ because of what she’d said.

It was the sudden glacial waterfall of the bigger revelation that the thousand droplets added up to, because—

Because what if it had never been his fault?

What if it had never been something that he’d asked for?  What it it had never been something he’d allowed, and encouraged, and deserved?

What if it was something that had been done _to_ him all along?

What if—

What if the hangups and the trauma and the fear—

What if all the shitty pain was _valid_?

What if he had never been contrary, or coy, or irrational?

What if all of it had been _real_ , and he was entitled to some time to hurt for it before he tried to drag the whole bag of broken pieces onward towards the next stretch of the road?

Rosé’s fingers tightened on his arm, and he startled again.  He was probably scaring the shit out of her, zoning out like this, having a nice little existential fucking crisis behind the scenes in the middle of a conversation.

“Sorry,” he said.  “Just—before Roy, there was—there were—some—not-so-great—people.  And I never really… I didn’t think about it the way you just said.”

Rosé was searching his face like it was a fucking treasure map, and she gently squeezed his wrist.  “Ed… do you want to—talk about it?  Sometimes it’s so much more helpful than you think it will be if you can just… unpack it with someone, work through it, you kn—”

“Sorry to interrupt,” the shadow that had fallen on the table said, resolving into a waiter in a black polo shirt when Ed instinctively pulled his arm away from Rosé and looked up.  “Are you guys ready to order?”

“Oh, crap,” Ed said, fumbling for the menu on the other side of the table.  “Um—go ahead, Rosé; I’ll figure it out.”

Even when he had time to think about it, he usually just asked for the first thing he saw that had bacon, so it wasn’t like this was a big strain on his intellect or anything.

The _other_ thing, though—

Maybe Rosé would forget to bring it up.  Or maybe she’d take pity on him and not try to get him to discuss it.

Miracles happened sometimes, didn’t they?

  


* * *

  


Fortunately, Rosé had been a font of minor miracles for the duration of the time that Ed had known her, and evidently she hadn’t changed her heavenly-chorus tune in the last few months: either she’d been distracted enough by the waiter to forget the topic they’d been on, or she’d sensed that Ed would rather stick his bare hand into a bonfire than belabor it right now.  Whichever it was, she dropped the subject and started telling him about the obscenely cute girl named Catherine who worked at the front desk, with whom Rosé apparently had a roller-skating date next week.  Jeez.  And people—well, Al and Winry—said he and _Roy_ were cheesy as fuck.

But it was really nice, cheesy or no.  It was really nice to get to sit down with someone who already liked him and just… be.  To just talk about random life-shit without anything to gain or lose, and just _exist_ for a while, in the sunlight, inhaling a sandwich with some bacon on it.

Maybe Al had a tiny little portion of a point about Ed trying to live too fast and do too much all the damn time, and how that was wearing him down at an unreasonable speed.

The problem was that the stuff to do just never stopped coming, and either you hopped the train, or it left you behind.  Ed wasn’t about to get stranded at the fucking station, so he didn’t have a choice.

Right?

Anyway, they laughed a lot; and wished Russell well in his new, sober endeavors; and Ed told her a little bit about his research in lay terms; and she told him about some of the cases she’d taken, and some of the other people she was working with who weren’t quite as cute as Catherine but nonetheless well worth knowing.  Apparently Has Beans was still—horrible pun inevitable—grinding right along, so successfully these days that Marta was having trouble hiring enough young punks to stand behind the counter and struggle with complicated drinks.

“If the whole professorship thing doesn’t work out,” Rosé said, with a more-than-slightly mischievous twinkle in her eye, “you could always come back.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “’Cause there’s nothing I miss quite as much as getting up at the ass-crack of dawn and making sugar-free half-caf ‘like-they-do-it-at-Starbucks’ lattes for badly-tipping yuppie scum.”

Rosé laughed.  “Anyone ever tell you that you have a way with words?”

“Only people who’re biased,” Ed said, “which skews the data.”

Obviously, what that meant was _Only Roy_.

“I’m going to make you another mug,” Rosé said.  “One that says ‘just like they do it at Starbucks’ on the side.”

“You’re a little bit evil,” Ed said.  “I approve.”

“Thought you might,” Rosé said smugly.

Well—s _mug_ ly, probably.

…man, Ed needed an intervention.

  


* * *

  


He got a little more lab time in later that afternoon, and when he was sitting next to the window, he almost couldn’t smell burnt plastic, so it was possible to work through a few more grant proposal reviews.  Two job applications had already come in for the research assistant position, which was awesome; he was planning to give it some thought before he decided whether he wanted to bring them in for interviews right away or wait for a few more résumés to accumulate before he did anything drastic.

In the end, though, once he’d squinted at a couple of the samples he’d managed to extract from this mess of a day, it wasn’t anything he had to be _in_ the lab for, so he straggled home relatively early for once.  A couple texts to Roy and a brief interlude of pantry-searching later, they were going to be having lasagna, and Ed was _excited_.

The prep part was actually kind of fun once he set everything out on the table and got to the point of piling layers into the dish; it was sort of like prepping a gel, except… it smelled like food, and he was getting to think about Roy being really happy to eat it, and there was not-horrible cheese all over the place.  So really not like a gel  at all.  Which was probably actually what was fun about it.

Even more fun was collapsing on the couch after it went into the oven and absently paging through the next couple of grants he was supposed to review, and then hearing Roy come in and perking up like a fucking puppy even though he’d fully intended to play it cool or some shit.

Fortunately, there wasn’t much time to boil in shame, because Roy swept into the living room before he could even get up and leaned down to kiss him where he lay.

“Hello,” Roy said into the inch of space between their mouths when they parted.

Ed was—again with the puppy shit; _God_ —panting a bit.  It wasn’t his damn fault Roy was so good at this whole… thing.

“Hi,” he managed.  “Food’s on.”

Roy kissed him again.

Then Roy kissed the little scarring line over his eyebrow.  Once it had started itching, Ed had seriously considered taking the stitches out himself—he would’ve been careful; nobody would’ve known the difference—but urgent care called to schedule a follow-up appointment mere minutes before he reached for the scissors and some tweezers, so he’d let the professionals handle it.

“Knowing that I’m coming home to you,” Roy said, “makes everything easier to deal with.”

Ed wrinkled his nose.  He tried to remember that since this was still technically Roy’s house, it was Roy’s prerogative to set the schmoop tolerance for the building however he saw fit.

That didn’t mean Ed couldn’t _complain_ , obviously.  Just that he had to bend to the rules eventually whether they made him cutesy-nauseous or not.

“I mean it,” Roy said, settling down on the floor next to the couch and draping one arm across Ed’s waist.  He was grinning.  What a nerd.  “Reminding myself that every day has a built-in reward in the form of time with my all-time favorite specimen of human being—” Ed tried to bury his face in his hands, but Roy caught them at the wrists and kissed his knuckles before he could writhe away.  “It’s incentivizing, plain and simple.  Like giving a rat cocaine if he finishes a maze, or whatever it is that you all do in your secret little labs.”

“Oh, my God,” Ed said.  “‘Cocaine Rat’.  That’s your new pet-name.  I’m calling you that forever.”

Roy grinned a little more, the asshole.  “I’ll wear it with pride,” he said.  “And sign all of my text messages with it from this day forward.”

“ _Eugh_ ,” Ed said.  “You’re so hyper-romantic you’re immune to retaliation.  That’s not fair.”

“Love and war, my dear,” Roy said, knitting their fingers together on both hands, which was utterly unnecessary and—unfortunately—nice and warm.

Speaking of nice and warm—

“Shit,” Ed said, trying to get out from under the admittedly really pleasant pile of half-cuddling Roy on top of him.  “I forgot I was gonna make garlic bread.  I think there’s still time.”

“You did all the hard work,” Roy said, attempting to lever himself to his feet and pin Ed to the couch at the same time.  Ed did not miss the way that he winced—several times—on the way up.  “Let me take care of this part.”

“But you got dinner yesterday,” Ed said.  He was putting up a tragically halfhearted tussle against Roy’s restraining hands—partly because he didn’t want to hurt the stupid-perfect piece of shit; and partly because if he actually fought, and Roy actually pushed him down onto the couch, things were going to go in a different nice and warm direction, and the lasagna would burn while they had significant amounts of sex.  Which would be great, certainly, but they _still_ wouldn’t have garlic bread.

Roy smiled at him with the ever-so-slightly-sad eyes.  “It doesn’t matter.  I’m not counting points.  And you don’t have to, either, sweetheart.”

“It’s not that I’m _counting_ ,” Ed said, trying to wrestle one arm free without Roy noticing.  “I just… remember.  Not on purpose, or anything.”

“I suppose it would be a bit absurd,” Roy said, “to ask you not to pay attention to a mathematically-categorizable phenomenon.”

“I’m pretty sure that whatever you just said makes sense,” Ed said.

Roy tugged gently on both of his arms, giving him the momentum to hop up off of the couch.  “Why don’t we make it together?”

Ed opened his mouth, and in the back of his throat, he could feel the words singing little lines of cursive— _Why don’t you fucking marry me?_

He shut his mouth.

He swallowed.

And then he managed a smile.

“All right,” he said.  “You win this round, Cocaine Rat.”

Roy actually snorted.

It was cute.  For a drug-addled rodent, anyway.

  


* * *

  


“Hey,” Ed said when they were halfway through dinner and no longer in imminent danger of starvation.  “Can I ask you something that sounds sort of weird out of context?”

Roy was eyeing the garlic bread like he knew he _shouldn’t_ have a third piece, but he was probably going to anyway.  Ed fucking loved him, and also identified immensely.  When Roy glanced up, though, his focus fixed on Ed and didn’t waver for a second.  “Of course.”

“Okay,” Ed said.  He wanted to chicken out, but he knew—some part of him knew, at a gut level, down in the bone marrow, like a festering in his chest—that this was important enough that he had to power through.  “So… as a person—like, not as a lawyer… I mean, I know lawyers are people, and _you’re_ a person, and also a lawyer, and that obviously those two parts of your identity are intertwined, and that the one affects the perceptions of the other—”

“I can answer from a personal perspective only,” Roy said, blinking in very placid way considering that his boyfriend had just word-vomited all over the table unprompted.  “What would you like to know?”

Ed chewed on his lip for a second, then ran his tongue along the back of it, then took a breath, then bucked up and spoke.

“What does consent mean to you?” he asked.

Roy paused.

Bad sign.   _Really_ bad sign.  Sign reading “FUCKING BAD” in blood-red neon shining from the side of a stretch of pitch-black gravel road where your car had broken down, and two of your tires were flat, and you weren’t getting any cell service, and you could swear you’d just heard something out in the darkness breathe.

“I’m guessing you mean in the context of relationships?” Roy asked.  “Or, rather… sex, specifically.”

Weird how talking about it in so many words was way more awkward than getting naked with somebody who had seen you moaning and drenched in sweat about a thousand times.  Ed mushed a remnant of a chunk of tomato against the edge of his plate.  “I—guess.  Sorry.  Stupid question; it’s just—Rosé works at this crisis center now, and she was talking about it, and she got me thinking, and I just—”

“It’s not a stupid question,” Roy said.  “It’s a very reasonable one, and it’s important.”

Ed could feel his face heating—always with the fucking forge under his skin; always with his heart hammering in the middle of it.  Always with the weapons.  Always with the sharp edges; and eventually, somebody was bound to get hurt.

“Never mind,” he said.  “I didn’t—I mean, it makes it sound like I’m—accusing you of something.  Or like I—want something different.  And I don’t.  Let’s just—let’s not go there; it’s no big deal.”

Roy reached across the table and laid his left hand over Ed’s right—holding it still enough that Ed couldn’t fidget with the fork anymore.

“I really think it’s a conversation worth having,” Roy said.  “If it makes you uncomfortable—”

“No,” Ed said.  “It’s just—”

Gently, Roy squeezed his hand.  “What it means to me,” he said, “is that both parties have verbally expressed or unmistakably implied that they are enjoying the present activity and anticipate enjoying any future suggestions.  Since that’s subject to change, I think it’s the responsibility of both parties to communicate if any part of the activity ceases to be enjoyable, at which point that concern should be immediately respected and in some way resolved.”

Ed had to swallow a few times.  Steel-kissed smoke stuck in the throat like a motherfucker.

“Put a bit less clinically,” Roy said, still clutching onto his hand, “it needs to be clear to everyone that it’s fun and safe for everyone, or it isn’t consensual.”

“I know _you_ think that,” Ed managed.  “Which is—well, fucking… part of the reason… you’re so great.  Actually.  It’s just— _I’d_ never—I sort of figured it was… another thing about you that’s awesome.  Rather than—I dunno, some kind of standard.”

Roy winced.  “Unfortunately, much of society is… not on the boat just yet as far as that goes.”

Ed looked at the table for long enough to visualize the words for the thing he was thinking.  And Roy just… waited.  Waited while he fucking spelled them out, one letter at a time, and then took a breath and forced himself to make them real.

“I didn’t figure it was something I was entitled to,” he said.

Roy’s grip on his hand tightened again.  In another second, that was going to hurt.

“But whatever,” Ed got out.  “Like—water under the bridge and shit.  It’s just that what she was saying made me think about it; that’s all.  Anyway, how the hell was your day?  I mean, look at us, we’re both home and fed, and it’s not even eight yet.  It’s a fucking Christmas miracle.”

“Ed,” Roy said very softly.  “Another thing you’re entitled to is the opportunity—the _invitation_ , even, if you need it—to work through some of the things that were done to you, and to recognize them as traumatic before you try to make yourself move on.”

Ed was still looking at the table.  Nice woodgrain.  Nice and… familiar, sort of.  Apparently he’d spent one too many conversations staring at this tabletop while he tried to wrangle some coherence out of his stupid brain.

Also, he thought he might throw up.  Which would be a fucking pain, because this lasagna had been a shit-ton of trouble, and tomato sauce always burned on the way back up, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to extricate his hand from Roy’s fast enough to make it over to the trash can.

“I dunno if I’d say it was traumatic,” he said.  If he just… shit.  Roy was absolutely fucking immune to distraction tactics—not a surprise, really, given the whole lawyer thing, but it was incredibly inconvenient when Ed’s head was spinning heedlessly, and that was the only strategy he could think of.  “Whatever.  I just sort of—I mean, honestly, I just sort of wanted to see if I was the _last_ person on the planet to hear about this whole thing, right?  ’Cause if Rosé is talking about it like it’s the new world order, and you already know, and I’m sure Al’s been on it since day one, and you know how I hate it when knowledge gets away from me, so—”

“When you were telling me about Soph Kimblee,” Roy said, very quietly, and Ed—froze.  Which was better than freaking out; at least the reason for paralysis could be… all kinds of shit.  All kinds of shit other than _I think he was fucking there today, Roy; I think he was following me out of my fucking lab—but I could be losing my goddamn mind and hallucinating it out of the sheer fucking fear instead, and either way I don’t know what the hell to do_.  “You said… there was a part where you mentioned that you told him ‘no’.  In so many words, I think—or at the very least, you said you didn’t want to; you asked him to stop… And that was even before that final incident with the hotel room and the handcuffs, and…”

The silence was deep.  Cavernous.  A guy could get lost down here and never find his way back up.  That cold, moist Earth smell was everywhere, so thickly pervasive you felt it in the bottoms of your lungs.  No canaries.  No ladders.  No lights.

“I’m sorry,” Roy said, so fucking gently—but sound was startling, and Ed flinched.  And then hated himself for flinching.  Couldn’t he even get through a single fucking conversation without turning into some kind of— “God, Ed, I just—you _bury_ yourself.  You bury the bad things; you bury your feelings; you try so damn hard to hide it all, and you just keep _going_ —like you deserve to be some kind of repository for all of the evils in the world, but the whole thing will collapse if you so much as admit that you’ve been wronged.”

Ed’s skin felt like it was on fire—peeling off of him in curls and sheets as it fucking burned.  The air in his skull was expanding, and it was pushing his brain matter up against the walls, and there was just—there was nothing; there was _nothing_ in his head, and nothing in his chest; the bottom of his stomach dropped, and the vacuum tore the rest of his guts out with it.

“Sorry,” he said.  It was the only word still circling like a carrion bird above the wreckage.  And usually it worked.

“No,” Roy said, gripping his hand too hard now; pain shivered upward towards his shoulder and zinged back down.  “ _I’m_ sorry.  I’m sorry you’ve been through all of this–through so many of these damn hurricanes.  I don’t know.  And I don’t know how many there have been.  It never stops for you.  I’m sorry for that, and I’m sorry that I don’t know how to make it better—how to make it hurt less; how to get to the root of it and… I just want to help.  I just want to help you heal, but I don’t know if you _can_ if you won’t admit it even to yourself that you’re bleeding.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Ed said.  Hollow desperation—the reflex; the ritual.  If he just kept brushing shit away no matter how many times it tried to catch him— “I mean… it’s not like he ever did anything… _really_ shitty.”  The grain of the table was so much safer than the sharp-fanged shadows in his memory that he didn’t dare to glance up.  “It’s not like—I mean, he didn’t—hold me down and… it wasn’t—”

“If you didn’t want it,” Roy said, “it was an assault.”

“I mean—” Ed’s throat stuck; the words rasped in and out.  Metal on the whetstone; too dry.  “I always—came around.  Usually by—by the end, you know, I mean it wasn’t— _bad_ ; usually I—liked it.  He’d—it’s not like I didn’t get off, or—”

“Ed,” Roy said.  “If you didn’t consent, it was rape.”

Ed’s heart beat very loudly in his ears.

There was a funny little loop in the wood grain right next to the edge of his plate.

“That’s not—” he said.

Except.

“It wasn’t—” he tried.

But.

His heart was still beating.  He could hear it.  “It doesn’t—”

Words had definitions—incontrovertible baselines of meaning.  You could fudge the rest, but at a fundamental level—

If he fought this one, he was undermining every person in the world who’d ever been fucking hurt like that.  He was taking the _fact_ of that word away from them—its ugliness, its hideous criminality, the sick lurch every rational person got when they even thought about it—

The victims of it deserved to have that much—to be able to take as much solace in that as it offered.  Ed couldn’t fucking deny the single most basic tenet of what that word meant without casting shitty aspersions on all of the people who had _really_ suffered.

He felt—

Very small.  Very distant.  Detached, like he was drifting; like a very lost balloon.

“Oh, God,” Roy breathed, and then he’d let go of Ed’s hand, and then the table shuddered as he tried to move around it too fast and banged his hip—which probably hurt, but before Ed could ask about it, he’d knelt on the floor in front of Ed’s chair.  “I’m sorry,” he said, and his hands settled lightly on Ed’s thigh, which was an awkward angle, so Ed pushed off the floor with his toes to try to swivel his chair around, and the chair legs ground and then reluctantly shifted.  “I’m sorry,” Roy was saying again.  “I’m so sorry; I didn’t mean to dredge it up—”

“It’s okay,” Ed said.  He was fairly sure it was—that things, _it_ , whatever, were all relatively decent at this point in time—but he couldn’t seem to access any of his emotions.  There was a wall there—bright white plaster, a dozen inches thick.

“It isn’t,” Roy said, and he was getting up only to lean down, which was seriously inefficient but ended in him wrapping his arms around Ed’s shoulders, so that was all right.  “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry for all of it.”

Ed managed to move his hands on the second attempt to communicate with his own limbs.  He lifted them up and curled them around Roy’s biceps to hold him there.  It felt nice.  “It’s not your fault.”

“Fuck,” Roy said, which should’ve been startling, but it didn’t smash a window through the wall.  Shook it a little, though.  Plaster dust and shit.  Roy was drawing back; his hands fluttered carefully around Ed’s face.  “Hey.  Look at me?”

Ed made a serious attempt to focus through the haze on Roy’s gorgeous eyes.  Roy’s gorgeous eyebrows were drawn in.  The corners of his gorgeous mouth had turned down.  He looked very concerned on top of all of the gorgeousness.

“I’m fine,” Ed said.  And he was, because the wall was there, and as long as it was, the ocean on the other side couldn’t touch him.

“Christ,” Roy said softly, and he didn’t sound _angry_ , exactly, but that was the sort of thing people—people other than Ed, who swore like breathing—only said when they were exasperated.  And exasperation always slipped into annoyance, and annoyance was just instants away from anger, so really, he might as well have been— “You don’t have to be fine.  You don’t _have_ to—you don’t always; you don’t ever.  It’s all right.  You can feel—bad, you can feel hurt, you can acknowledge that—”

“It’s not—” Ed attempted.  Roy’s face scrunched up.  No dice.  “I mean, it didn’t feel like… it didn’t feel like… that; it wasn’t…”

“I have seen people do what you’re doing,” Roy said, leaning his forehead against Ed’s very gently and closing his eyes.  “I have _done_ what you’re doing.  And I know it feels better—feels safer, and stabler, when you just lock it up and crush it down and look the other way and pretend that you can’t see the shadow.  I know.  I know the numbness feels better for a long, long time.”  He opened his eyes.  Nobody had any right to go around looking like that—beautiful and regal and deeply fucking pained.  “But you’re going to have to feel it some time.  It’s going to hit you.  It’s like any other input—like an experiment.  You have to process the data sooner or later, or it’s just going to pile up, and one day your brain’s going to start digging through it for answers at the worst possible time, and it’ll overwhelm everything else.”

“Well, yeah,” Ed’s voice said, because his voice was a fucking asshole.  “That’s—I mean, that’s some textbook psychology, right?  That it’s—that repressing—”

“I would hardly call anything about you ‘textbook’,” Roy said, gently guiding Ed’s hair back behind his ears, “but it’s… sort of your trademark coping mechanism at this point.”  He smiled.  Fucking _sadly_ , like this was some kind of horrifyingly undeniable documentary of something terrible that’d happened in human history while people just stood by—like this mattered; like this— “I don’t want you to have to cope, sweetheart.”

“It doesn’t feel—” Ed swallowed.  The light brush of Roy’s fingertips against his scalp was disproportionately distracting.  “I don’t… feel like… I should… complain.  I don’t feel like I’ve got any fucking right to point out shit that went—bad, or whatever.  The shit that didn’t go how I wanted.  I can’t… sit here and make a laundry list of the stuff that sucked.  I mean—fucking look at me; I’ve got—you, and the job I always wanted, and _Al_ , and he’s finally all happy and shit.  And even when it was hard, it was like—I never had to go a whole day without eating or something.  I always had a fucking roof over my head.  I always had people—like, if I’d needed a loan or something, I _know_ Pinako would’ve had my back, you know?  It just—it just never got—I don’t have any right to—”

His throat stuck like he’d tried to choke down a shard of glass, and it was breaking into a hundred individual pieces.

“I should be happy,” he said.  “I _am_ happy, I—I got everything I always f-fucking wanted; I got shit I didn’t even d-dare to fucking _say_ I wanted in c-case I j-jinxed it—”

“Oh, God,” Roy said.  He knelt down beside the chair, wrapping his arms tightly around Ed as he went, drawing them both down, holding on so fucking tight, like Ed was something precious.  “Edward Elric—you are perfect.  You are perfect just the way you are.  You’re _enough_ ; you have always been enough.  You are beautiful and brilliant and captivating, and I don’t ever want you to change—I don’t want to change anything _about_ you.  I just want you to be able to see yourself the way you _are_.”

“I’m a f-fucking mess,” Ed said into his shoulder.  “Is what I am.”

“We all are, sweetheart,” Roy said, mouth brushing against his ear.  His fingers curled into Ed’s hair, then smoothed it down.  “We’re all just doing the best we can to hold it together.  You’re doing _fine_.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “F-fucking breakdowns every other w-week.  Doin’ fuckin’ great.”

Roy’s fingers carded through his hair, slowly.  “That’s not a reflection of failure.”

“I always thought—” He dragged a shaky breath in and released it gradually.  “I guess it’s f-fucking s-s-stupid, but I always—I thought—maybe you get to a fucking—threshold—and—”

Roy kissed his cheek.  “And past a certain point, you ‘figure it out’, and everything finally clicks and falls into place?”

“S-stupid,” Ed said.

“No,” Roy said.  “Optimistic.  Innocent.  Alive.”

“I feel like the fucking walls are c-caving in,” Ed said.  “I _always_ feel like the f-fucking walls are caving in.”

Roy buried his face in Ed’s hair.

“I know,” he breathed.  “I know; I know.”

“Every f-fucking day, it’s like—treading water and just barely—and you keep thinking you s-see the fucking shore, but—”

“I know,” Roy said.

“Maybe it d-doesn’t all f-fucking work all of a s-sudden—” Speaking was such bullshit.  Breathing, too.  Being, actually.  All of it.  “—but there’s g-got to be a part where—where it stops being s-so fucking _h-hard_ —”

“I can’t fix it,” Roy said softly.  “I can’t make it easy.  I can’t make it go away.  I think a lot of people hold out hope that finding someone to love is going to be the lynchpin, or the turning point, or whatever it is—that if you just find the right partner in crime and charity, everything will come together.  That you collect your royal personage at the top of the tower, and the fight ends, and the rest is just _happily ever after_.”  He sighed, and nuzzled his face into Ed’s neck, which was equal parts awful and heart-rendingly fucking cute.  “But there’s no magic.  The battle goes on—every minute, every day.  There are still dragons around every corner.  There always will be.”

He drew back, then, and his eyes were shining, and his smile was so fucking sweet that every damn part of Ed’s body felt like a toothache.

“All it means,” he said, “is that you have someone to fight alongside you.  Someone who will always have your back.  Two swords instead of one.”

He reached up, hand ever so slightly unsteady, and brushed Ed’s hair back for the thousandth time.

“For whatever that’s worth,” he said, “I’ve got you.  Always.  I will fight for you until the day I die—longer, if this is the kind of story with ghosts in it.”

“Fucker,” Ed said, wetly.  “I f-fucking love you.”

Roy leaned forward to kiss him—once, twice, twice and a half or something.  They blended together after the first few; where did you draw the line between one kiss and another, anyway?

“Can you take Friday off?” Roy asked when they parted for more than a second or so.

“Not really,” Ed said.  “Office hours.  And then a meeting with my TAs to start working on the midterm.  And the grant things’re due at five or something.”

“Half a day?” Roy asked.

Ed chewed on the inside of his lip while he moved the Tetris blocks in his mental schedule around.  He probably would’ve had his hand in his hair by now except that Roy was holding onto it.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Let’s go somewhere,” Roy said.  “Let’s go to the aquarium and make things up about marine biology and then eat seafood and get sarcastic about the circle of life.”

Ed did his damnedest to wrangle his hands halfway back around Roy’s.  “Can we go to an aquarium in a different country?” he asked.  “One without any cell service?”

Roy smiled.  “That might be difficult to arrange within a single weekend, but I’ll see what I can do.  Do you have a sovereign nation in mind?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ed said.  “I’ve never been anywhere.”

Roy stared at him for a long second, and then he smiled again—the terrible, halfway-to-broken one again this time.

“I can’t believe I never thought about it,” he said.  “But of _course_ you haven’t; you’ve been working too damn hard your whole life to make the time, or pay for the passport, or… any of it.  Haven’t you?

“Maybe,” Ed said.

“I will also,” Roy said, “see what I can do about that.”

Ed tried for a grin, and it worked a little better than he would have expected.  “You gonna spirit me away on a fancy European holiday or some shit?”

“There is a distinct possibility,” Roy said.  “Although I will stop short of kidnapping.”

“Always nice to hear,” Ed said.  “But if you told Al in advance, like… he’s probably the only person who’d report it.”

“What about your lab?” Roy asked.  “And your classes?  And—”

“Shit,” Ed said.  “Okay.  Never mind.  Definitely don’t kidnap me and spirit me away to Europe or whatever shit.”

Roy was trying not to smile.  “I’ll do my best to resist the potent temptation.”

“Good,” Ed said.

“Good,” Roy said.

And it—

Well.  It wasn’t as bad as it had been.  And that was fucking something.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, friends, sorry the update schedule has gone so weird! I feel like I've been running on reserve battery power since………… a long time. I have no idea. Haha.
> 
> I was going to warn for another emotionally intense chapter, but then I discovered that they are ALL emotionally intense. o__o @me, what the hell were you doing when you wrote this one?? ARE YOU OKAY??
> 
> Quasi-tangentially-related: keep an eye out for Roy/Ed Week on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/royedweek2019) and/or [Tumblr](https://royedweek2019.tumblr.com/)! Dates and prompts should be out soon! :3c

The shitty sleep schedule finally catches up to him: he passes out so entirely that he almost snores straight through the last-ditch third phone alarm meant to rouse him in time to make his train.  Not that he snores, or anything.  Ever.  Even when he’s sick.  Obviously.  Anyone who says different is a liar and a slanderer and probably a cheat.

Slander or otherwise, he flings himself in and out of the shower, races to the Tube, gets uncharacteristically lucky with the arrival times and a blessed lack of weekday morning delays, and ekes onto the eight o’clock train to Oxford in the nick of time.

Naturally, the train station at his destination sits in the very bottom of what seems like a bowl made of city from down here—it’s a good three-quarters of a mile, mostly uphill, before he can even see the university.

He takes it easy, though, less because it’s tiring—after Edinburgh, none of the gradients here look especially daunting in any case—than because he wants to move through this place slow enough to soak it in.

This is the city that his father left them for.

This is the world that Hohenheim picked instead.

Was it worth it?

Better question—does it _matter_ if it was?  It’s what Hohenheim chose.  It’s what he wanted.  It’s what he ended up with, and it’s what landed them both here.

If Hohenheim regrets it, it’s too late.  The ship has sailed; the tide’s gone out with it, sweeping back to bare the beach so suddenly that there are suffocating fish flopping all over the place, spattering wet sand in their desperation to wriggle back to the water; it’s fucking carnage out there—

There’s a possibility that Ed is still a little bit sleep-deprived.

There’s also a possibility that he’s a little bit unhinged.

But this feels—important.  Maybe not _good_ ; maybe not _right_.  But better than any of his alternatives.  Better than just letting it go.

He kills a little time by touring every library they’ll let him into—all of which look like museums in their own right, with art galleries all over the ceiling and shelves upon shelves of beautiful books, from fuck knows what reaches of antiquity—

He’s not sure whether pictures are allowed here, but he sneaks a few, feeling like a criminal, because this is another thing he’ll think he dreamed up if he doesn’t commemorate it.

The world is just too big, isn’t it?  Too big to take in; too big to carry; too big to fix or see or understand.  Too big to balance the children that die unmourned in the streets with the ones whose footsteps echo down these halls while they crane their necks almost to straining, trying to glimpse the edges of a masterpiece.

Ed isn’t quite enough of a stalker to have dug up the schedule of classes that Hohenheim will be teaching this term—although he thought about it; it’d be sort of poetic to waltz in there and say “Guess how easy people you’re really looking for are to find?”  But he figures eleven or so is a likely time for the man not to be too busy, so he turns up at the office that they listed on the website, confirms—just in case—that the gilt lettering on the door is the right damn name, tries to peer through the frosted glass without pressing his nose to it or anything embarrassing like that, and then knocks.

“Come in,” his father’s voice says.

Ed takes a deep breath, puts his hand on the doorknob, and turns.

He’s pretty proud of himself as he steps in.  He manages to smile, and he also manages to swallow _Ain’t payback a bitch?_

“Oh, heavens,” Hohenheim says, adjusting his glasses.  Is that some kind of coping mechanism, or a nervous habit, or—?

Fuck, Ed got the nervous habits from him, too.  Is that it?

“Good morning,” Hohenheim says, covering pretty admirably, Ed has to admit: he barely even pauses.  “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, rather than _That’s kind of the point_.  “I ended up needing to change my flight, so I figured I’d swing by before I left.”

“Of course,” Hohenheim says, which is ridiculous, because that particular response makes it sound like he _knew_ , which… fucking typical.  And fucking typical of Ed to get piqued about a stupid, two-syllable platitude answer, entirely because of who’s giving it.  “Please, come in—have a seat.  Can I get you anything?”

Ed’s not sure whence Hohenheim was planning to produce the moon and/or stars and/or unicorn and/or American coffee that Ed would ask for if anything was actually on offer, but he does let the door fall shut behind him and sidle forward to take one of the chairs standing opposite Hohenheim’s rather regal desk.  The chairs are impressive, too—high-backed with studded cushions that seem like real leather, although Ed’s kind of distracted from the prospect of stroking them to find out; he has to make picking the seat furthest from Hohenheim’s look natural.

“Nah,” he says, since he’s supposed to say something.  “I’m okay.  Thanks.”

Hohenheim smiles broadly, then hesitates, then takes off his glasses and starts wiping them with a corner of his sleeve.

Ed smiles back.

And keeps smiling.

And waits.

“Well,” Hohenheim says right as the strain of smiling placidly is starting to make Ed’s face hurt a little bit.  “Is there anything in particular that you’d like to see or do while you’re here, or…?”

“I checked out the libraries a little,” Ed says.  “If there’s stuff you think is worth going to, then sure.”  He leans back and languidly crosses one leg over the other at the knee.  It’s body language he stole from Roy—for when you’re about to drop a truth bomb and you don’t give a fuck what gets caught in the blast radius of it.  “Mostly I came because I didn’t get any kind of chance to say goodbye to you last time.”   _When you fucking left_.  “I wanted this time to be different.”

Hohenheim’s eyes narrow behind the glasses, and a part of Ed fucking thrills to it—this is the bright panic; the deep adrenaline; the _Good, fuckin’ come at me_ fight or flight impulse swelling in the center of his chest—

“I had dared to hope,” Hohenheim says, “that you’d come to understand that it wasn’t nearly so simple as you’re making it out to b—”

“I get that,” Ed says.  “I mean it; I do.  I get that you had your own life you had to live, and your own choices you had to make, and that’s…” He can’t say _fine_.  It’s not true.  “Well, it’s behind us at this point.  We all did what we had to do, and it’s too late to change any of that.”

He leans forward, putting both feet on the floor again.  He folds his hands.  He waits until Hohenheim’s frown succumbs to a twist of curiosity.

And then he drops the next one.

“Al and Winry are gonna have a kid,” he says.  “Maybe more than one, if everything goes okay with the prototype.  You didn’t do right by us, and you didn’t do right by Mom—but you can do better this time, if you want to.  If you’ve got it in you now.”

The play of emotions across Hohenheim’s face is too complicated to look at without Ed losing his train of thought, so he fixes his eyes on his own hands instead.

Lots of little scars, and scrapes, and creases.  Lots of evidence of all the bullshit he dragged himself through to get here.  He’s never been to a palmist or any of that, but he’s willing to bet that if there’s any science in that stuff, they’d take one look at his lines and say _When are you going to believe that you’re not a failure?  When are you going to have the courage to let yourself be weak?_

“I’m not asking you to be Grandfather of the Year or some shit,” he says.  “And I’m not asking you to move out there, or fuck up this life you’ve got, or anything like that.  I’m just asking—I’m just _suggesting_ —that you could do something different this time.  You could _be_ there.  And if what I want counts for anything—I want you to.  I want you to be there for Al’s kid.  You don’t have to see ’em every weekend, or every birthday, or whatever; none of that stuff really matters.  I just want them to know you exist.  I want them to go through their life never having any doubt that they’re loved.”

He breathes in deep and twists his fingers together, watching the angles shift as they interlock.

“It’d mean a lot to Al,” he says, “if you came out and visited after the kid’s born.  That’s still a long ways out and stuff, but it’d mean a _lot_.  And I think Pinako would really like to see you, too.”   _Even though she had to do all the hard work that you weren’t doing, and she’s got every right to spit in your face for fucking off and leaving her with the bill_.  “And Winry’d probably like to meet you—re-meet you, I guess, but probably she doesn’t remember you very well.”  He swallows.  “And I think—Roy’d like to meet you, too.”

“That’s—I would love to, of course,” Hohenheim says, which is the start of a real promising justification-spiral.  “But you understand better than many that there are… demands—”

“Yeah,” Ed says, looking up at him again to shoot him a warning glare.  “There are lots of demands in anybody’s life, yours included.  I’m making one.  You gotta _be_ there for this kid.  You don’t have to visit, or write little fancy-ass cards, or send checks, or anything like that—but there’s a camera on every damn laptop and an internet connection out in the middle of every nowhere these days.  You gotta be there _emotionally_.  You have to give something.  Some part of yourself.  Okay?”

Hohenheim blinks at him, like Ed’s speaking in fucking tongues instead of making a fairly obvious statement about how familial relationships are meant to work.  “Well—yes.  Naturally.”

“Naturally,” Ed says slowly.  “I’m partly responsible for this kid’s well-being, and you bet your ass I’m gonna take that seriously.  Either you’re all in, or you’re out—for now, forever, for good.”

Maybe it’s a pipe dream.  Maybe it’s a dead-end road, and he’s revving the engine like it’s the Autobahn, and he’s about to turn himself into a crash-test dummy against a brick wall.

But God fucking _damn_ it, maybe it’s not.  Maybe it’s possible, if you work hard enough, try hard enough, bust your ass enough—maybe it’s possible for a kid to grow up without ever being disappointed by somebody that they love.

If Ed does nothing else in this life, he’s going to teach Al’s and Winry’s gorgeous little brat what family means—what family _is_.  That family’s not just about who you’re born to and who you bleed like; family’s about who will walk beside you when the ground is coals and gravel and broken glass and lend you one of their fucking shoes.  That family is about the people who never leave you hanging and never let you down.

Hohenheim looks at him intently for a long-, long-ass minute.

“All right,” he says slowly.

“All right,” Ed says.

Hohenheim pauses, drums his fingers on the edge of his desk, and then brightens.  Ed’s a tiny bit impressed; it only looks a little forced.

“Would you like to take a stroll?” Hohenheim asks.

“Sure,” Ed says.  “Whatever you want.”

He tries—he really tries—to say _Dad_ at the end of that.

It doesn’t come out.

But maybe _Grandpa_ is going to happen for this kid now.

Maybe he can give them that.

  


* * *

  


Ed almost managed to sabotage their little… trip.  Thing.  Getaway.  And it wasn’t intentional in the slightest, unless you gave his subconscious credit for some extremely impressive bits of long-range telepathic suggestion.

For starters, he’d had to get a new centrifuge delivered, because it had turned out that the possessed one was still under warranty, but then the drivers had hit traffic; and that pushed Ed’s office hours back a little, and then office hours ran over because he had a student who wanted to tell him all about how her family dog had inspired her to get into biology, and he wasn’t about to tell her to shut up and get out, especially because it was a really _great_ story despite its irrelevance to the midterm; and then one of his TAs got extremely confused about why he wanted to make the midterm, y’know, a test of knowledge rather than an impossible knowledge labyrinth that you were supposed to fail to teach you humility; and then…

And then he was buried in the last of the grant reviews, head filled with swirling hypotheticals, when he heard a familiar throat-clearing sound from the lab doorway and looked up so fast that he very nearly strained his neck.

“Hello,” Paola was saying.  “Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” Roy said.  “I promised I wouldn’t resort to kidnapping, but I’m starting to reconsider my stance on the issue now th—”

“Shut _up_ ,” Ed said.  “You know better’n anybody how illegal that is.”  He hopped down off of his chair and made a vague _come the fuck in already_ gesture towards Roy.  “Paola, this is Roy.  Roy—Paola.”

Smooth bastard was halfway across the lab and extending a gracious hand before Paola had even succeeded in putting down her pipette and peeling off her glove.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Roy said.  “I’ve heard really wonderful things about you, both as a scientist and a person.”

Paola executed a very understandable feat in multitasking: shaking Roy’s hand while turning firetruck-red.  “Oh… I… thank you.  It is—it’s a—it is very nice to meet you, too.”

For Ed, this was not unlike looking back through a warphole at his own reaction the first time Roy’s fine ass had sauntered into the coffee shop and almost killed him on the spot.  This had to be some kind of cosmic punishment—what had he done wrong lately to deserve this?

“Dr. Elric promised me I could borrow him for the afternoon,” Roy was telling Paola, “and, if I get my way, for the majority of the day tomorrow.  I hope that’s not too inconvenient?”

“Oh,” Paola said.  To be fair, _Oh_ was frequently the only sane reaction to Roy turning the Suave Dial up to eleven and a half.  “Of course not.  He really should—he never seems to take a break.  Are you doing something nice?”

Roy exchanged a look with Ed, the unmistakable implication of which was _I’ll be doing some_ one _nice, if you get my drift_.

Then he returned his full attention to Paola, because he was good like that.

“That’s the hope,” he said.  “I think it’s psychologically very healthy to get out of one’s primary habitat—so to speak—every once and a while.  Refreshes the brain.”

“I quite agree,” Paola said, looking enraptured enough to quite agree with just about anything.

It also stood to Roy’s credit that he didn’t usually take too much advantage—or at least not in a cruel way—of his talent for ensorcelling people on the spot.  “In any case, we won’t be going too far—so if there are any emergencies, I’m sure Ed will want to know.”

“When I mentioned Roy,” Ed said, “did I warn you that he can charm water from a fucking stone?”

Paola blinked several times—still at Roy.  Ed sympathized.  What snake was it that mesmerized people in all the crappy fairy-tale apocrypha?  Cobras?  “It… might have come up.”

“Don’t give me that face,” Ed said when Roy immediately turned to him with a beatifically smug little grin.  “Take a seat; I gotta finish this before we can go.  But I’m almost done.”

Roy looked around himself, pulling his suit jacket a little closer around his torso for histrionic emphasis—which was _very_ fucking distracting, thank you.  “Is there anywhere I can sit where I won’t get irradiated and/or risk destroying precious samples?”

“The floor,” Ed said.  Paola was staring at him.  “What?”

“Don’t worry,” Roy said to her.  “Giving people shit is one of his ways of showing affection.  You should see him with his brother.”

Pointedly, Ed crossed the lab to pull out one of the unused rolling chairs and dragged it over to Roy.  He placed it in the center of the floor and then stepped back, bowing deeply.  “Your majesty’s ass-rest.”

“Case in point,” Roy said.

The thing was—

It sucked.  The thing was that it sucked, because getting ribbed over nothing _was_ one of the hallmarks of a position of immense honor in Ed’s life—but so was ordinary respect.  And there was an instinct in him—a sick, dark, shitty fucking instinct, born a long damn time ago, bred in the shadows of subliminal messaging and ingrained in his brain—to try to distance himself from Roy in front of other people by acting like an asshole.  There was a part of him that didn’t feel… safe, or comfortable, or whatever it was.  There was a part that didn’t feel entitled to schmoop and PDA.

The question—the really, really stupid, horrible, gut-twisting, agonizingly necessary little fucker nagging at his mind—was whether it was a toxic masculinity thing in a broader sense; or whether it was because Roy was a guy.  Was it because Ed had been taught from the start that love was a weakness; or was it because he’d been taught to be ashamed of being gay?

Fuck.

“Hey,” he said, forging through the quagmire in his head and reaching out to grab Roy’s sleeve.  That was… indicative without being nauseating, right?  “You want anything?  Glass of water, or a coffee, or…?”

“I’m fine,” Roy said, “b—”

“Obviously,” Ed said.

Roy blinked.

And then Roy grinned, and his eyebrow arched, and he finished, “But… thank you.  Does the monarchy you bestowed on me endow me with any particular privileges?”

Ed opened his mouth to say _You’re gonna find out this weekend, aren’t you?_ and then remembered in the nick of time that Paola was about five feet away, probably watching this in a combination of mortified horror and abject fascination.

“Uh,” was what came out instead.  “Let me just… finish… the reviews.  It’ll only be a minute.  Sorry.”

Roy laid one hand on the back of the chair and gracefully folded himself into it.  The instant he’d settled, he slung one leg over the other and then propped an elbow on the armrest, the better to set his chin on his hand and look at Ed, brows high and lashes low.

“Take your time,” he said.

Goddamn asshole motherfucker knew _exactly_ how sexy he was.

Ed sat back down at the bench and forced his eyes to focus on the words on his laptop screen.  Identifying and pronouncing the individual letters in his head didn’t really help him with the whole assessing-the-potential-of-the-grant part, but after a minute, it helped him drag his brain a safe distance away from some not especially abstract thoughts about putting a lab coat down on the floor so Roy could fuck him there.  Not right now, of course, because obviously Paola was around; and also it was abnormally hot in here all of a sudden.  But—theoretically another time.  Maybe.

Grants.  Right.  Had to get through that part first.

Besides, lab-floor-sex would be really rough on Roy’s knees.

He snuck a few glances over at Roy while he was typing up his thoughts about whether this particular proposal had promise for general success, and also specifically for the future funding that it might bring to the university, and so on and so forth.  Roy was scrolling through something on his phone—work emails, probably, which would make him Ed’s personal favorite hypocrite.

He’d done a pretty good job on all of the other reviews, so he felt justified in skimping a little—just a little—on the very last one.  It wasn’t like it was unclear, anyway; and it wasn’t like they wouldn’t be able to feel the hours of effort radiating off of every page.  Besides, he wasn’t skimping _much_ ; he was just… summarizing… a little shorter… than he’d summarized… for the rest of them…

And—done.

He skimmed through his mostly coherent notes, which was basically as good as proofreading, and then attached the document to his waiting draft email, skimmed that too, and clicked to send it.

He breathed out slowly.

And then he spun around in his chair.

“Okay,” he said.  “So how’s about that little vacation I was promised?”

Roy was up and out of the chair—and, to his ever-increasing credit, pushing it smoothly back into place—and then straightening his suit jacket.  “How about it?  I was checking the traffic; if we’re relatively quick about picking up your things—”

“Way ahead of you,” Ed said, hiking up his old backpack, into which he had thrown his toothbrush and some relatively clean clothes this morning before he left.

Roy grinned slowly.  “Might I suppose that you’ve been looking forward to this more than I expected?”

“I was trying to keep it on the down-low,” Ed said, “so that the other explodable lab equipment wouldn’t get suspicious.”  He went over to lean against Paola’s bench, which was a much better angle for eye contact without her getting distracted by Roy’s ambient gorgeousness.  “You sure you’re gonna be okay?”

“As positive as a proton,” Paola said with a giant, super-cheesy grin.  Roy _snorted_.  So at least that took care of the distractingly-gorgeous thing.  “Please, please—go.  Have fun.  Take some pictures.  Get some sleep.”

“It’s gonna be tough to do that all at once,” Ed said, “but just for you, I’ll give it a shot.”

“That is very kind of you,” Paola said.  “If anything appears to be on fire, I will call you.  Otherwise—just _go_ , Ed.”

“Fires can be sneaky,” Ed said.  “Even if you think it might not be a real fire—”

“He is going to kidnap you,” Paola said.  “And then I will be obligated to tell the police, and he will go to jail, and you will not get to have your vacation at all.”

“You hire terribly sensible people,” Roy said.

“Or sensibly terrible people,” Ed said, putting his hand on Paola’s shoulder for a second and squeezing before he started for the door.  “All right, all right; I’m getting out of your hair.  Have a great weekend, okay?”

“Only if you do,” Paola said.

“I will do my best to make sure of it,” Roy said.  “Very nice to meet you.”

“You, too,” Paola said.

Roy’s hand splayed itself on the small of Ed’s back and started to push a little bit, somewhat meaningfully, so Ed let himself be propelled out of the lab and down the hall and out into the _sunlight_ —

“This is a good idea,” he said.  “This is a really good idea.”

“I know,” Roy said.  “And once you’ve relaxed enough to stop thinking about all of the things you feel like you ought to be doing instead of enjoying your life a little bit, it’s going to get even better.”

Ed drew in a deep breath and let it out slow.

“All right,” he said.

Roy caught his hand on the swing of the next stride and tangled their fingers together.

“All right,” he said.

  


* * *

  


They left Ed’s car in the parking garage—he’d paid unreasonable amounts of money for that damn parking permit, after all; might as well use it—and took to the road in Roy’s.  As it turned out, an hour’s drive was just about exactly long enough for Roy’s obnoxious charm to wear through the last of Ed’s lingering concerns and general misgivings and force him to start to relax.  In the end, he almost wished they’d been in the car for longer, which was probably a sign of some latent centrifuge-explosion-related damage to his brain or something.

“Jesus,” he said as they finally rolled onto the main street and started passing some of the tourist traps that led to the last local bastion of marine magic.  “That’s a swanky-ass hotel up there.”

“You think so?” Roy asked.

“Just look at it,” Ed said.

“Good idea,” Roy said.

Apparently Roy felt pretty fucking strongly about it, because he then pulled up to the painted curb labeled _10-minute parking_ and stopped the car.

Ed blinked up at the front of the place, then over at him.  “Yeah.  See?”

“Yes,” Roy said.  “But I think we should get a closer look.”

“What?” Ed asked.  “Wait—”

Roy was getting out of the car and circling to the trunk to get his bag, so Ed had to scramble to catch up before the bastard tried to carry all his shit.

“You didn’t fucking _book_ us here, did you?” Ed asked, snatching up his backpack right as Roy reached for it.

“We’re taking a vacation,” Roy said, and he was grinning, and— “The first one that you and I have ever had together; possibly the first one you’ve ever had in your _life_.  Besides, I never gave you a congratulations present for your doctorate.”

“I don’t need a congratulations present,” Ed said.  “I don’t need any presents.  And you took us out to dinner, you liar.  What—”

He was about to drop a couple of bombs, which began with F and concluded with a few other choice letters, but there was a guy in a polo shirt with the hotel’s name embroidered on it holding the door open for them, so he bit his tongue instead.

Roy swept a hand out to usher Ed through.  “Thank you very much,” the sneaky fucking bastard said to the employee.  “Let me spoil you rotten just this once,” he said to Ed.

“You ever smelled something that’s _really_ rotten?” Ed asked.  “You won’t wanna come near me after that.”

“I have,” Roy said, lightly.  “But I promise you I will.”  They’d reached the front desk, so Ed couldn’t try to sort through that one.  “Good afternoon,” he said to the receptionist.  “I should have a reservation for tonight, under Mustang.”

“Why did you do this to me?” Ed asked—in a voice that he was really hoping was low enough that the guy looking for Mustang, party of two on the computer wouldn’t hear.

“You’re mixing up your prepositions, dear,” Roy said.  The fact that he matched Ed’s volume to the decibel almost made Ed forgive him for the shit-eating grin that came with it.  “ _For_ you.  I did it _for_ you because—”

“Here we are,” the guy said.  “We have you in 301.  Will you be needing any help with your luggage?  Or valet parking, perhaps?”

“I don’t think we brought much,” Roy said, “but I will take you up on the valet.”

Ed glared at Roy.

Roy winked.

In a matter of minutes, Roy was swiping one of the two card keys that the guy had dealt them.

Ed had waited, shoulders so tense that a dart of pain speared through the right one—waited for the look, or the question, or the dawning comprehension and the _Excuse me, sir, but the room you booked only has one bed_ , but it had never come.  He wondered, sometimes, if Roy didn’t care, or simply wasn’t scared, or just tamped it all down a hell of a lot better than he did.

He couldn’t ask now even if he wanted to, because Roy was turning the door handle and letting them into…

Fucking Shangri-La or some shit, holy _crap_.

Ed swallowed.

He stared.

He stared a little more.

There was a lot to stare at, so it was taking a while.  There was a fucking queen-sized bed with honest-to-God _curtains_ , all neatly drawn back and tied around the posts; there was a fireplace and two armchairs; there was a little desk with a fucking orchid on it; there was a weird, old-timey-looking contraption that was either a rack for hanging business suits or a really complicated hookah; there was a mini-bar and a coffee machine perched on a marble countertop; and—more staggering than anything other than the bed—there was a huge bay window lined with a cushioned window-seat that went all the way around the _corner_ of the room and looked out over the beach and the ocean directly below.

Ed was only about eighty percent confident that he was still breathing at this point.  This was probably a vivid hallucination, or a fever dream, or—

“Is it all right?” Roy asked.

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘Is it all right?’” Ed asked.  “It’s _ridiculous_.  How much did you pay for this?”

Roy was grinning at him, slow and smug and distractingly warm.  “Less than half of what I’d shell out in a heartbeat for another second of your expression when you walked in.”

“That’s a bullshit answer,” Ed said, turning to look at the fucking opulence laid out in front of him again.  “Why did—”

Roy moved behind him, steps soft, to cozy up with his back—tugging the bag out of his hand and setting it on the floor, then wrapping both arms around him and squeezing gently.

“I want you to know that you’re worthy of nice things,” Roy said, all breathy voice and gentle hug, and Ed was not supposed to melt for this cliché romance shit, but at some point during the past year, Roy had fundamentally altered his chemical composition, and all of his properties had changed.  “I want you to feel like you deserve luxury.”

“I don’t need luxury,” Ed said.

“No one does,” Roy said.  “Most people don’t ‘need’ most of what they have, or want, or pay for.  But what I need is for you to have the chance to enjoy things you’d never ask for by yourself.”

Ed wrinkled his nose and wriggled in the embrace a little bit.  Roy kissed his ear and then released him, which was disgusting; and then he turned around to look the conniving bastard right in the eye.

“It’s not that I’m not grateful,” he said.  “I _am_.  You’re fucking sweet, you asshole.”

“That’s a new one,” Roy said.

“Shut up,” Ed said.

“That’s not,” Roy said.

Ed eyed him.

Roy mimed zipping his lips and then held his hands up for peace.

“Right,” Ed said.  “It’s not that I don’t—appreciate it.  I do.  And I—appreciate the stuff you _say_ , too, okay?  I’m listening.  Even if it doesn’t… always… sink in.  Register.  Change my mind.  Whatever.  I really do listen, is what I’m saying.  But it’s just—y’know, _this_ —” He gestured in an admittedly sort of flaily way to the room around them.  “This sort of—stuff—I mean, I feel like I’m… stealing.  Like—not just that I’m trespassing on the territory of snotty rich people who are used to getting the red carpet treatment or whatever, but from… I dunno, like, all the other people and stuff that that money could go to instead, you know?”

Roy smiled at him.  Adoringly.  What a _bastard_.  “Well, unfortunately, it’s too late for that, since they’ve already charged my card.  At this point, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to make the best of it.”

Ed gave him a nice, long sardonic look.  “Welcome to the first class of Missing the Point 101, with Professor Mustang.  I’m going to pass out the syllabus; your first reading’s called ‘Guilt-tripping me into trying to act like an entitled asshole isn’t gonna work’.”

“Oh, God, Ed,” Roy said, stepping forward in the same instant that his face fell.  That twisted the bottom of Ed’s stomach so hard that the nausea was dizzying for a second; Roy raised both hands and brushed his knuckles against Ed’s cheek, so at least that anchored him on Earth again.  “You’re missing _my_ point.  I’m not trying to guilt-trip you into anything—the last thing in the world I want is to make you feel guilty; the last thing I want is for you to feel like…” He was at the hair again, carding his fingers through Ed’s bangs.  “It’s just that I want to treat you, because I know you won’t treat yourself.  That’s all it is.  I want you to revel in a little taste of…” He swept a hand out in a way that really wasn’t much more specific than Ed’s attempt at indication, though it somehow looked grand instead of stupid.  “This sort of thing.  Just… nice sheets; a view; the sound of waves; _room service_.”

Ed’s heart turned to stone, and then to iron, and then to lead.  It sharpened around the edges until it was shaped more or less like an anvil.  And then it dropped.

“It’s because of him,” he said, and he knew that it was true as he said it.

Roy went very still.

“Kimblee,” Ed said, like either of them could possibly not realize who the fuck he meant.  “Just—the things he used to—he used to _work_ at making me feel—out of place, and then guilty about it, and then like I was… taking advantage, or—”

“It’s not like that,” Roy said, hands fluttering helplessly and then starting to stroke at Ed’s hair, his face, his shoulders— “It’s nothing like that; I’d never—”

“I know,” Ed said.  And he did; he fucking _did_ know, logically, in the rational thought-centers of his supposedly-capable brain.

That just wasn’t enough, sometimes.

Times like now.

“It’s just—” He drew a breath; let his eyes fall shut—Roy’s fingertips were always so fucking soothing on his skin.  “Baggage.  I—muscle memory or something.  Residual shit.  It’s—I’m sorry.  I—”

“No,” Roy said softly.  “I’m sorry.  I should have thought—”

“How the fuck could you have known?” Ed managed.  “ _I_ didn’t even know until it was…” Too late.  As usual.  “Until now.”

If he didn’t open his eyes, maybe this whole thing would just… stop happening.  It had never worked before, but maybe if he really tried to wish it all away—

“If I’d really analyzed some of the things you told me,” Roy said, “I would at least have thought to ask you about it first.  Trauma lives in patterns—it gets resurrected in recurrences; it _hides_ , and then… do you want to leave?  We don’t have to stay.  We really don’t.”

“They already charged your card,” Ed said.

“I was fibbing,” Roy said.  “They usually don’t until the end of your stay.  And if they have, they can refund it.”

Ed peeked just enough to see where Roy’s shirt was, which gave him a target for latching onto Roy’s arm.  “It’s—really—okay.  I mean, it’s—different from the kind that—he liked.  It’s—warm.  It’s a nice place.  I don’t want—”

The arm he’d latched onto shifted and then curled around him as Roy wrapped him into a hug.

“This is supposed to be a retreat,” Roy said.  “This is supposed to be relaxing.  And if it’s not, that’s not your fault, and I don’t mind—but we need to fix it so that it is.”  He rubbed his cheek against Ed’s hair a little, which was awful and cute and a tiny bit ridiculous, which… helped.  “Please, in all honesty—do you want to go?”

Ed cracked an eye open again, looking past Roy’s sleeve at the room.  It _was_ nice.  It was nice, and there was a lot of… color.  Kimblee had liked modernistic shit—monochrome spaces; sharp angles and open floor plans with stark, sharp lines.  This was different.  This was a little bit weird and a little bit twee and a lot… cozy.  Or it certainly could be, if the circumstances were right; if…

“Hang on,” he said.

More than a smidgeon reluctantly, he extricated himself from Roy’s arms and crossed over to the broad window with the waves fucking sparkling practically right underneath.

He sat down on the window seat, pried one of the latches up, and pushed the pane outward to let in a rush of slightly salty breeze and the rolling roar and crash and subsiding hiss of the waves.

“Can we start a fire, too?” he asked.  “I mean, it’s not like it’s cold, but…”

“Anything in the world,” Roy said, coming over to sit gingerly beside him, “that makes you feel at home.”

Ed reached out, and Roy met him halfway.

“You do,” Ed said.  “You make me feel like that.”

Roy turned his hand, kissed the palm, and then shifted in to settle close against him—just… leaning, gently, on Ed’s shoulder and running the pad of one thumb over the knuckles of Ed’s captured hand.

“That’s really all I’ve ever aspired to,” Roy said, softly, looking out at the water past the windowpane.  “To be able to be that for someone as wonderful as you.”

Ed nudged his head against Roy’s cheek a little.  “Guess you can retire, then.”

“Apparently so,” Roy said.  “But that’s why this…” He tilted a shoulder to indicate the room again.  “This in particular, that is—it just doesn’t matter.  The details don’t change anything.  So if you’d feel better leaving—even the slightest bit—then let’s _leave_.  My solitary criterion is to be with you wherever we end up.”

The bastard either didn’t know what kind of hell he wrought on Ed’s cardiovascular health, or he knew exactly what he did and secretly sort of reveled in it.  Given how close their skin and their chests and their blood vessels were in the grander spatial scheme of the world, though, it would’ve been difficult for him not to feel Ed’s pulse and figure it out.

But that conspiracy theory was going to have to wait.

Ed cleared his throat and tried to unwind the tangle of thorn-riddled vines in his stupid brain.  “I think it’s… I think part of the—problem—is that he used to treat it like… the hotel rooms and the nice stuff and whatever were these… gifts that he was giving me, but—conditionally.  Only as long as I was—good or… whatever.”

“As long as you did what he wanted,” Roy said.

Ed wasn’t sure whether or not he hoped that Roy heard the other part of it—the sticky, snarled layer underneath.

_In exchange for the kind of sex_ he _wanted, whenever and however he wanted it._

_In exchange for putting up with the acid and the coldness and the pointed, half-veiled criticism at every fucking turn._

_As a reward for being docile in the face of the abuse._

“But I like—this,” Ed said, casting another look around them.  And he did; he _did_.  It was nice.  It was soothing.  And he had Roy’s steady heartbeat at his back.  “You think if—well, hell.  You have a reservation for us for dinner at some posh-ass place, don’t you?”

Roy had settled his cheek in against Ed’s, so Ed could feel the smile.  “Guilty as charged.”

“Let me pay for it,” Ed said.  “And the aquarium tickets.  And… well, if you want something dumb at the gift shop, you’re on your own.  But let me—be responsible for some part of it.  So that I’m not just _getting_ all this stuff—for free, but with these strings on it, so it’s like I’m obligated to give something back.  You know?”  He tried not to cringe.  “Would that be okay?”

“Of course,” Roy said.  “But I really don’t think it’s fair for me to pick the venue and you to have to pay; there are a thousand other places we could e—”

“Nope,” Ed said.  “I want it to be the one you want.  Only my dollar.”  He twisted around enough to look Roy in the eye.  “Can you live with that?”

Roy raised an eyebrow at him.

“Oh, no,” the bastard said dryly.  “My gorgeous boyfriend is going to pay for a delicious dinner that I get to spend in his incomparable company.  However will I survive?”

“Shut up,” Ed said.

Roy grinned, kissed him, drew back, and winked.

“You shut up,” he said.

Ed made a face.

Roy made one back.

“Asshole,” Ed said.  “When’s that reservation for?”

Roy glanced over at the little digital clock on the nightstand.  “About… twenty minutes.  Is that all right?”

“I dunno,” Ed said.  “Is that time for you to get all fancied-up?”

Roy grinned.  “Let’s find out.”

  


* * *

  


It was a close thing, but Roy managed to keep his preening procedure under a grand total of ten minutes.  The results were fucking infallible all the same.

Most men looked good in suits.  Some men made suits look ever better just by wearing them.  Roy Mustang, however, looked like the entire history of fashion had conspired to culminate in any given single instance of him wearing whatever suit he had put on this time, which seemed to have been designed thread by fucking thread for the sole purpose of flattering him to an unreasonable degree.

“Maybe we should cancel dinner,” Ed said when Roy stepped—well, _sashayed_ , more like, because he fucking knew how good he looked; “and skip straight to dessert.”

Roy adjusted his lapels.  He’d forgone the tie, which was good, because Ed wouldn’t have been able to keep his hands off of it.  “I don’t think there would be anything straight about it.”

Ed scowled at him, which did not have the desired effect of reducing his smug fucking grin a single iota.  Instead, Roy came over and fiddled unnecessarily with the collar of Ed’s nicest dark blue shirt, which he had paired with his nicest black slacks, his least-flashy belt, and his cleanest boots.  Al had made him swear up and down that he’d never wear this shirt to the coffee shop, because apparently the prospect of it getting stained was “too terrible to contemplate given how it complements your hair,” or something similarly melodramatic.

“You look distractingly delectable yourself,” Roys said.  He smoothed his hands down Ed’s sides for good measure, and Ed suppressed a shiver at just how fucking _good_ that felt.  “Unfortunately, I don’t think either of us has sufficient nutritional value to replace real food, so perhaps…”

“Read you loud and clear,” Ed said, grabbing for one of Roy’s hands and holding onto it, the better to start towing him towards the door.  “C’mon, let’s go stuff ourselves stupid on local seafood.”

“Poetically put,” Roy said.

  


* * *

  


For all of Roy’s halfhearted linguistic protests, though, that was exactly what they did.  And it was glorious; and there were weird things like whatever a sunchoke was in half of the food; and Roy claimed he had no room for dessert but then made a big, stupid, obnoxiously sexy show of licking some leftover chocolate off of Ed’s fork.  And then he slipped and almost stabbed himself in the eye, and Ed was torn between concern and uproarious laughter, and Roy said something about instant karma, and then… Ed paid for the whole thing.  And tipped really well.

And that… helped, actually.  More than he’d expected.  It put him back in the fucking driver’s seat.  This wasn’t just something he was _receiving_ as payment for being well-behaved.  This was something they were doing together, because they both wanted to—because neither of them wanted to be anywhere else than here, with each other, making extremely stupid fork puns until Ed had digested enough to be capable of movement again, and he no longer felt like he might die if they tried to get up and leave.

Roy’s hand was just hanging there, next to his way-too-snappily-suited side, as they started down the sidewalk for the short stroll back to the posh-ass hotel.

Ed reached out and grabbed it and fucking held on.

A part of him still didn’t want to.  A part of him still didn’t feel like it was—safe, or wise, or _permitted_ , or some shit like that.  A part of him still didn’t feel like he could flaunt it without repercussions, either societal or—forks or no forks—personally karmic.

But the rest of him was so fucking glad to be _here_ , and alive, next to this other human being in particular.  The rest of him urgently needed Roy to feel some of that knee-melting fucking gratitude and understand just how much in Ed he had slowly, gently, gradually changed.

After a few seconds of Ed wringing the life out of the poor man’s gorgeous and vulnerable fucking fingers, Roy glanced down at him.  He picked just the right fucking moment for it, too, because he was Roy Mustang, and of course he did—right as they passed a streetlamp that basically put a fucking halo behind his head.

“Are you all right?” Roy asked.

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Yeah, I really am.”

  


* * *

  


Especially after the unreasonably sinful things Roy had been doing with that fork right up until it tried to kill him, Ed had anticipated some overtures towards and execution of at least one session of riotous sex.

Except—

“Look,” Roy said, holding out a monogrammed bathrobe that he’d extracted from the wardrobe-thing.  “Swag.”

Ed very nearly choked to death on his own spit, which would have been a tragically anticlimactic early end to this vacation.  “I—you—”

“Swag,” Roy said again, which made it even worse.  “I mean, it is, isn’t it?  Hashtag _apparently I am too old to be hip with the lingo_.”

“I think you’re a great age,” Ed said, kicking his shoes off by the door and crossing over to Roy.  “Wouldn’t have you any other fucking way, and you know it.”

Roy grimaced.  “What is it if it’s not swag?  It has their logo on it.  Isn’t that the idea?”  Extremely dramatically, he sagged back against the door of the wardrobe, clutching the robe to his chest.  “Oh, God.  My good years are beyond me.  It’s all over.  Tell my family I love them.  Time to take me out back and put me down.”

“You can research the nuances on Urban Dictionary on your phone later,” Ed said.  He stroked a bit of bathrobe that was protruding from the throes of Roy’s existential crisis.  “This is pretty nice.”

“I know,” Roy said.  “That was why I was getting it out for you.”  He managed to stand up straight enough to sling it onto Ed, threading Ed’s arms into the sleeves for him.  “With… possibly a slight ulterior motive.”

Ed frowned at him.

Roy stepped back, paused, and beamed like he’d just won the swag lottery.

Ed looked down.  The bottom hem of the robe almost brushed the floor.

“I am,” Ed said, “so pissed at you right now that I can’t even process it.  It’s just like a _wall_.  This—veil of fucking incandescent rage—stop _smiling_ , you piece of shit—”  Roy’s grin was just so big and so stupid that it was starting to extinguish the rage with some kind of carbonated water, and the bubbles were coming up as a laugh.  “I said _stop_ , asshole—Mustang, you absolute—”

And then he had two robe-swathed arms full of Roy, and a mouth full of Roy’s tongue, and a heart full of butterflies with wings of fucking flame.

“Would you like to watch a movie?” Roy asked when they’d drawn apart enough to breathe.  “With or without the terrible, terrible, obscenely oversized robe.”

“Only if you don’t care if I fall asleep,” Ed said, and that was… 

That was something he shouldn’t have said, because it was a little bit of a test.

“Of course not,” Roy said.

Passed.  Flying colors.  Fuck him; he was just so—

“Though we should probably pick a movie neither of us is invested in,” Roy went on, “and you should probably brush your teeth.”

“You sound like Al,” Ed said.

Roy’s eyes lit brighter than the fire Roy had made behind the grate right before Robegate began.  “You always say that like it isn’t the highest compliment you ever give.”

Ed wrinkled his nose.  “Well—I mean, I say it because it’s… true.”

Roy kissed his forehead.  Gross.  “At which I am more delighted than I can express.  Let’s brainstorm mediocre movies to watch while we practice good oral hygiene, if you know what I _mean_.”

“You are something else,” Ed said.

“Any idea what?” Roy asked, towing him towards the bathroom.

“No,” Ed said.  “But I sure am fucking glad you’re mine.”

  


* * *

  


The robes—because of course there were two; and of course Roy’s didn’t even approach the floor, but he spent so much time swinging it around by treating the thing like a dashing hero cape that Ed forgot to be annoyed about it—were beautiful.

The robe-clad cuddling was even more beautiful.

And the next morning, when the sun crept up from the foot of the bed to bathe their faces, and Ed blinked himself awake looking into it and then turning enough to see Roy stirring next to him—

Well, shit.

And then the aquarium was beautiful.  The tanks themselves; the long, long halls; the quasi-industrial warehouse-y décor; the fish, the _sharks_ , the rays, the jellyfish—

Fucking gorgeous.  Fucking unbelievable.

And the gift shop was… kitschy as hell, actually, but in the exact way Ed secretly liked.

They bought a bunch of stupid crap for everyone, and Roy actually tried to hold his hand over Ed’s eyes at the register and remind him that His Bastardliness had been permitted to pay for it, and Ed had to fight him for the ridiculous souvenirs he’d picked out for Al and Winry, and they ended up with two filled-to-bursting mixed-up bags of merchandise.

And then they went to the place with the handmade chocolates, and that…

It turned out that chocolate-dipped strawberries were actually _not_ overrated, which was an extremely pleasant surprise right up until Roy got way too deep into enjoying his, and Ed had to take a second to distract himself by thinking about how evilly brilliant octopuses were.  Octopuses were sort of like Al, only with eight tentacles covered in little suction cups.  The mental image of an Alctopus with lots of twisty tentacles curled around toothbrushes, complete with a puff of hair but lacking a nose or any other recognizable features except the curiously cat-like eyes, could distract a man from a rather substantial quantity of carnal thoughts.

Clam chowder was beautiful.  The way the seagulls meaningfully eyed their bread was beautiful.  The way Roy meaningfully eyed Ed every time he started off on a self-deprecating tangent while “explaining research” was… slightly less beautiful in some ways, and more beautiful than any of it in others.  The sea was beautiful.  The moss-swaddled rocks were beautiful.  Even the screeching children gathering fistfuls of sea glass from the sand and pointing at every single cluster of kelp asking if it was a sea otter were pretty great.

  


* * *

  


The drive back was a bit of a letdown, though that didn’t really come as a surprise—on top of the fact that they were departing from all of the splendid wonders of the vacation and Roy’s undivided attention and the whole shebang, traffic conspired to make it a little worse.

Roy kept just… smiling at him, though.  And touching his knee.  And turning up the radio and singing along extremely badly, which made up for a lot.

“That was easy,” he said as they inevitably pulled up in front of the house.

“ _You’re_ easy,” Ed said.

“Only for you,” Roy said calmly, taking the keys from the ignition and giving them a completely unnecessary little twirl.  “What I meant was—that was very simple, and honestly very affordable, right up until our souvenir spree.”  He smiled a little wider this time.  “We could do that on a regular basis, you know.  Just one night away from everything every now and again.”

“I guess we wouldn’t have to get souvenirs every time,” Ed said slowly.  He wasn’t about to commit to this whole spectacular indulgence thing—that was the sort of slippery slope that led to you waking up one morning and realizing that you were yuppie scum.  And then you went to Starbucks in workout clothes that had never seen sweat and ordered an eight-dollar drink.  “Although I probably am gonna have to insist on the chocolate strawberry thing.”

Roy grinned.  “That I _know_ we can afford.”

“Yeah,” Ed said right as Roy reached for the car door.  “But we should probably have ’em up in the room next time.  Y’know.   _Alone_.”

Roy looked back at him, pausing with one arm extended.

“I think,” Roy said, “that I am going to book us another night for next weekend—right this second, actually, if you’ll excuse m—”

“Don’t you dare,” Ed said, but Roy’s overdramatic scramble out of the car made him laugh and ruin it.

  


* * *

  


The other cool thing about the short trip was that unpacking wasn’t a fucking ordeal.  The souvenirs were—once again—the worst of it.

“Hold on,” Roy said, digging in the multi-bag wreckage.  “I know they scanned those terrible anemone-shaped salt shakers for Riza—did they end up in your bag?”

Ed crossed back to where he’d left his collection on one of the kitchen chairs and tried to root through it without breaking anything, which was a bit of a trial.  “Uh…”

Roy fished in his pocket and came up with a folded receipt.  “Damn—I don’t… no, I don’t see it on mine.  Do you have yours handy?”

“Sure,” Ed said, digging out his wallet.  He tossed the whole thing over; Roy caught it in both hands.  “I shoved it in there somewhere.”  He directed his attention back to the bag to try to find Riza’s ungodly ‘gift’.  “Didn’t they wrap ’em in tissue paper or something?”

“I think so,” Roy said as he peered into the unplumbed depths of Ed’s wallet, which probably harbored enough bacteria to promote a brand-new plague, as well as at least three underused coffee shop rewards cards.  “‘Mummified’ might be a more accurate word.  Are you sure it’s…”

The sudden silence took Ed by surprise.  He’d just gotten his hand around a wad of tape and tissue paper that might have been shaped like two ceramic anemones underneath, and he’d been opening his mouth to declare victory, but something about the way Roy’s sentence trailed off and vanished stopped him in his tracks.

He looked up.  Roy had gone still.

And then Roy’s throat worked, and his fingertips delved into the third part of the tri-fold of Ed’s wallet, past the edge of where dollar bills extended, which was the place where all of the miscellaneous paper crap went to molder for eternity.

“What’s this?” Roy asked, and he drew out…

A little sliver of plastic a touch thicker and a bit shorter than a credit card—matte black with a few little gleaming stripes of gold that made it look sort of like a tiny circuit board.

And Ed—

Felt—

Like somebody’d just started a _Singin’ in the Rain_ dance number over the surface of his grave.

“I don’t know,” he said, and it was the truth.  “I don’t—think—I’ve ever… seen that… before.  How’d—how’d it get…?”

Roy turned it over slowly, holding it gingerly by the corner, to look at both sides.

And a part of Ed went frigid—sub-zero, instant ice all the way fucking through.

He let go of the trinkets he’d been fumbling for in the gift bag and made a beeline for Roy.

Roy was setting the wallet down on the coffee table—moving the same way Ed felt, slow and cautious, like something was liable to explode at a sudden movement.  Deliberate.  Like a thoughtful pair of zombies who knew already that they were halfway dead.

Roy turned the little card around again, touching only the edges.  A line of tiny white letters crawled halfway outward from the bottom corner.

“What’s ‘Deianeira’?” Roy asked.  “It sounds… vaguely familiar, but…”

“I don’t know,” Ed said.  His voice sounded hollow to his own ears—small wonder, when all of him felt empty.  The vacuum pulled; his stomach dropped; the whole world fell away— “But I—I think I know—what that is.”

Roy looked at him.

The hazy fragments of thought-ideas shifted and twisted and overlaid in Ed’s brain; slippery conjectures wormed into the rolling wave of the memories surging outward from the last few weeks to drown him with the revelation—

“I think it’s a GPS thing,” he said.  “A… like, a tracker or some shit.”

Roy was still watching him—eyes dark; forehead furrowed; mouth in a thin, flat line.  “How did it get into your wallet?”

Seafoam filled Ed’s throat; he tried not to gag on the fucking salt—

“At the ER,” he said.  “At the ER, he had my wallet in his hands for a second—I probably looked down at the forms or something; if he was quick—”

Roy’s eyes had always been a little too sharp, a little too clever— “If who was quick?”

“Kimblee,” Ed said.

The silence throbbed with Ed’s heartbeat, hard and heavy in his ears.  He would’ve snatched the stupid fucking thing out of Roy’s hands, but he couldn’t lift his arms; all his fingers had turned to ice and iron.

Probably it was better.  Probably Roy was trying not to put fingerprints on it.  Probably Roy had all the right instincts; probably Roy had sensed that something was wrong well before it registered with Ed just how fucking wrong it _was_ —

But it all made sense.  It all made far too much fucking sense.

“I kept—” Ed said.  Shit.  Shit, _fuck_ ; he had to rewind a long way—Roy didn’t know where this miserable fucking spitting gravel road began.  “He was—the one who hit my car.  Just—out of the blue.  And—and he drove me to the ER, which—I mean, I didn’t—I didn’t _want_ him to, but I was—kind of freaking out, and he insisted, and I thought probably he’d just dump me in a ditch somewhere and slit my throat, but he actually drove me there, but—but while we were there, he was—he would’ve had time to put it in my…”

“ _He_ was the one that hit you?” Roy asked.  “Why didn’t—” He closed his eyes, pressed his lips together, and swallowed the rest of the sentence.  It looked like it tried to strangle him on the way down.  “Did you tell anyone?”

“What, like the cops?” Ed managed through the tidal wave subsuming every last flicker of coherence in his chest.  “What the fuck could I say?  ‘So there’s this guy who used to stalk me, sort of, but I never filed a complaint or a police report or a restraining order’—”

“I don’t think there’s any ‘sort of’ about it,” Roy said.

“Whatever,” Ed said.

Roy’s brows drew together.  “It’s not—”

“I forfeited my right to bitch about it when I didn’t _do_ anything,” Ed said.  “Which is—beside the point anyway; it’s just that I can’t… I mean, I couldn’t turn around and try to get him arrested for rear-ending me.  That’s not a crime.  So it wasn’t—”

Roy raised the little black card again, and his eyes had gone… not distant, exactly, but unreadable.  All Ed could tell was that he was calculating behind them—flipping through the facts at his disposal so fast they fucking blurred.  “How does this factor in?”

Ed was having another revelation.  This one had been a long time in coming—but it had moved so slowly for so long that he’d honestly convinced some part of himself that he might be able to get away.

But he should have known.

He should have known he wasn’t going to be able to keep this shit from Roy forever.

As an inevitable corollary, he should have known that the longer he fucking waited, the worse it was going to be to ’fess up.

He hadn’t even really done anything _wrong_ , but he felt like—

Like his stomach acid was coming to a boil, and his heart was swelling big enough to block the bottom of his throat, and his ribcage was tightening around it.  Maybe if he just imploded, he wouldn’t have to deal with any of this shit.

Or maybe if he—made something up.  Maybe he could generate something relatively convincing.  Maybe he could at least throw Roy off the trail; maybe he could at least buy himself a little more time to—

What?

Carry this crap alone?  Because that was so much fucking _fun_.  Roy kept trying to tell him it wasn’t selfish to need help sometimes—and sure, he believed that; both as a principle, and as far as Roy meaning it when he said it.

But this wasn’t some _Baby, I had a long day; can you massage my neck?_ shit.  This wasn’t simple, or manageable, or casual in any fucking way.

This was deep.  This was a deep, dark, narrow fucking entrance to a rabbit warren where half the burrows were inhabited by venomous snakes.  And some of the rabbits were rabid.  And at any second the tunnels might collapse.

And there wasn’t necessarily any way back out.

How the hell else was he supposed to explain this fucking thing, though?  He’s already mentioned that Kimblee was responsible; the rest didn’t take a whole lot of advanced calculus to fucking figure.  All Roy had to do was work backwards from the fact that _Ed_ had determined what it was based on some undisclosed piece of evidence.  There weren’t a whole fucking lot of things that could have pushed him to such a definitive conclusion.  It was only a matter of time before the shock wore off, and Roy’s brain geared up, and then…

And then Ed was a coward for not having the guts to say it himself before Roy reasoned his way right to it.

Ed took one long breath, and then another, and looked down at the table so he wouldn’t have to watch Roy’s eyes attempting to bore through the layers of his crappy little half-truths and off-white lies.

He owed it to Roy to tell him the fucking truth now.  He _did_.

“I just—started—thinking I’d seen him places,” he forced out.  “Y’know, out of the corner of my eye, or… whatever.  And right after the thing with the car, he left—he put an envelope with photos of my car under the door to my lab, just so I’d know that he knew where I was, but—” He sucked in another breath and swallowed down the pulsing knot of fucking panic climbing up his airway.  “But I figured—y’know—the location of my lab’s all over the internet; anybody can find that; whatever.  But then I—a couple times, I could’ve _sworn_ I saw him, or—you remember that time we went to your office on Saturday, and I stopped by the coffee shop?  He walked in two minutes after I got there.  But I just—I mean, I figured—he lives around here, right?  It’s a free fucking country.  I was bound to run into him eventually; I thought—the fucking card had come up.  Maybe he’d been out of town for a while, and the thing with the car was just… the universe’s way of letting me know he was in striking distance again.  I don’t—know.  I thought—”

“Why in the _hell_ —” Roy stopped, dragged in a breath, squeezed his eyes shut—

But too fucking late, really, because the needle claws of the rest of what he’d meant to say—several dozen second halves of that sentence; imagined, inferred, implied—had already lodged in the meat of Ed’s fucking heart, and they dug deeper by the second.

“I’m sorry,” Roy said, biting out the words.  He wasn’t, though.  Or maybe he was; he never seemed to lie about anything—but being sorry was secondary to all of the other shit.  It was secondary to how fucking mad he was; it was secondary to _Why in the hell are you so damn worthless?_  “I didn’t… I’m not trying to accuse you of anything.  I mean that.  I’m not.  I just—”

He opened his eyes, and he was trying to make them soft, but his jaw stayed tight, and the whole effect made it clear that he was searching.  He was looking for something—a cause, an explanation.  He was looking for something other than the long-since-foregone conclusion that Ed was a colossal fuckup in every possible way.

“I’m just—I’m scared,” Roy said, siphoning out the syllables carefully so that his voice stayed gentle this time.  “I’m scared for you.  I’m scared of what could have happened to you, and what still could.  Of what he’s done to you before, and how much it still hurts you now.  And of how much progress you might have lost now that you’re having to deal with him again.”

Ed choked down a little ball of knives—things he knew he shouldn’t say.   _What ‘progress’?  Why are you wasting your time?  Don’t you get it—the real point?  The point of all of this shit so far?  Give up, Roy Mustang.  Give up and move on, because this is all I’m ever going to be, and this is all I’m ever going to get._

“It’s fine,” he said instead.  “It—I didn’t want to—bother you with it.  It’s my own fault, so—”

“How?” Roy asked, and he leaned forward, reaching out with his free hand, and Ed—

Stepped back.

And they froze like that for a long fucking second.

Ed could smell it in the sparking air between them— _How could you?  How_ dare _you?  After everything I’ve done—_

Roy dropped his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and Ed’s brain spun in helpless circles trying to make that fit into the pattern of the things he _knew_ were true.

People didn’t just… people didn’t apologize to _you_ when you reacted to a kind gesture—a gesture of peace, a gesture of fucking comfort, from someone you _knew_ was safe—like it was a fucking attack.  Context didn’t change that.  Your reasons, your instincts, whatever the fuck—that didn’t matter.  Ed shouldn’t have… What the hell was Roy saying?  It was like they were having two completely separate conversations; it was like they existed on parallel fucking timelines right now.  It was like Ed had become someone else entirely in the universe where Roy lived.  It was like all the rules were different there.

Roy’s eyes flicked up and down Ed’s face before Ed could attempt to leap off of the edge of his plane into fucking oblivion or something.  “I… Ed.  Please, just—listen to yourself for me.  Okay?  How can this be your fault?  How can you _think_ that?”

Ed looked down at the table again.  It was a lot easier than looking at Roy, obviously, although the sheer fucking surreality of the contrast—of staring at the weird gifts they’d been giggling over just minutes ago, compared with _now_ —was doing strange things to his head.  Probably even he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, given how many strange things went on in his head on a daily basis, but—still.

“I mean,” he said, slowly, “I didn’t… exactly… set a precedent for… retribution or anything, I guess.  Like, he didn’t… and I didn’t _leave_.  I didn’t leave town to get away.  That would’ve been the best guarantee.  And I could have, but…”

Roy made a noise in the back of his throat—unmistakable frustration.  Ed swallowed hard and steeled his fucking shoulders against the impulse to flinch; he was just going to make this worse.  All he wanted was for the fucking conversation to be over at this point.  All he wanted was to be _done_ with this—standing here facing each other and hashing out all of his bullshit was excruciating; all he wanted was for them to go back to trying to find Riza’s salt shakers and bask in the afterglow of their cute little vacation—

He couldn’t even have that.

It wasn’t that it was unfair—of course it was fucking fair.  He’d brought this on himself from day one, both in the cosmic sense, as another chapter in the stupid story of his life; and in terms of the play-by-play of this specific incident.  He’d done it to himself.  That was about as fair as life got.

But it still sucked.

“You’re talking like—” Roy held a hand over his eyes for a second.  “I’m sorry.  It _sounds_ … the words you’re using sound like that’s what you’ve been _told_.  Like you’ve been gaslit so many times you don’t even see it anymore.  That’s victim-blaming—what you’re saying to yourself; what you’re saying about yourself.  You’d never talk that way if it was anyone else; I know you wouldn’t; I _know_ you—”

“But it’s not someone else,” Ed said.  “It’s me, and I could’ve… I could’ve done a lot of things, if I was serious about it.  If I’d thought ahead.  I mean, I didn’t… It would’ve been selfish to pick up and move while Al was still in school, but—”

“Prioritizing your physical safety isn’t selfish,” Roy said.  There was a note of desperation in it; Ed glanced up, but the helplessness creeping into Roy’s expression was too fucking much to bear; the bizarre array of souvenir crap strewn across the table was a fraction easier.  “Ed—I’m not—upset at you; I promise I’m not.  I’m upset at—the situation.  At the mere fact that this is happening to you after everything you’ve gone through before; at—”

“It’s not that big a deal,” Ed said—mostly to the table, but the acoustics in here were good enough that Roy would hear him too.

“It _is_ ,” Roy said.  “And I’m—God, Ed, I am fucking _heartbroken_ that you don’t think you’re important enough to—”

“It’s not that,” Ed said.

“Some part of it is,” Roy said.  “Some part of it is that you don’t think your pain is significant enough to burden me with.”

That fucking sliced through the center of Ed’s chest like an axe blade on the downswing.

“Ed,” Roy said softly.  He reached out again—slower this time, carefully, and Ed knew, Ed _knew_ , that those hands had never fucking hurt him; and he suppressed his stupid instinct to recoil.

“Don’t wear it out,” he managed, fucking weakly, with the remainder of his resolve.

Roy offered a little smile that didn’t crinkle up his eyes.  His fingertips brushed very gently against Ed’s cheek, and then his hand settled on Ed’s shoulder and squeezed.

“I am on your side,” he said.  “Please, please believe me.  I am always on your side.  You can rely on it.  You can lean on me.  It’s not an imposition; I _want_ to be a partner in—in everything, Ed.  In your life.  In your emotions.  In your healing, I hope— _God_ , I hope—”

He opened his arms, and it wasn’t like Ed had much of a fucking choice other than to crumple right into them.

“I don’t even like dealing with my shit,” Ed mumbled into Roy’s collarbone.  “Why the fuck would you?”

Roy kissed his temple.

“Because I love you, silly,” he said.  “And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Gross,” Ed said, and if it got a little stuck on the way up, that was… a coincidence.  Clearly.

The hug was warm and tight and transcendent, which of course meant that it, like all good things, could not last forever.

“Sweetheart,” Roy said softly after a few more moments—and that was a bad damn sign; him starting _out_ with the pet name silver bullet was a huge red flag.  “Rear-ending you was not a crime.  Sneaking that into your wallet and using it to follow you is.”

Ed tried to shove his face a little further into Roy’s shoulder in a last-ditch attempt to distract him.  “I guess.”

Roy’s heart beat, and if there was a sound more comforting than that, Ed couldn’t name it.

Then Roy drew a deep breath to speak, and Ed braced himself—and hated the part of him that had to.

“I’m not going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to,” Roy said.  “And I’m not going to push you, and I’m not trying to put any pressure on you—none at all.  But if… Ed, if we don’t do _something_ , I don’t know if this is going to stop.  I don’t know if _he’s_ going to stop.  And you have power here.  I know it might not feel like it, but you do.  The law is behind you.  He’s filthy rich and apparently extremely clever, but he can’t hide from the kind of evidence that you’ve got stockpiled by now.  He can’t get out of this.  If you’re willing to take it to court, you’re going to win.  And that might be the only way to end it.”

That sounded—nice.  That sounded pleasant, in a far-fetched, some-other-world kind of way.  Like the sort of thing that Ed would feel a flash of empathetic happiness for if it happened to somebody else.

“I’d fight for you,” Roy said quietly.  “You know that, don’t you?  Everything I have, everything I _am_ , is at your disposal, and all I want is for you to be able to focus on living your own damn life, Ed.  You deserve that.  I know you don’t feel like that’s true, but it is; that is your fundamental right, and—”

He sighed, softly, and the hug tightened just a little more.

“I’m sorry,” he said for the umpteenth fucking time.

“ _Why_?” Ed said.  “I mean— _I’m_ fucking sorry; I’m the one who dumped all this stupid shit in your lap when… why are _you_ —”

“This isn’t about me,” Roy said.  “And I keep forgetting that.”  He drew back just far enough to run the pads of his thumbs outward along Ed’s cheekbones, feather-light.  “This is about you.  This is about what you need, and what you’re comfortable with, and what will help you, and what _you_ feel, and… me ranting about what I think is best for you is more or less irrelevant.”

Ed closed his eyes and let the warmth of it—of the touch; of the words; of the intention—wash right over him.

“It isn’t, though,” he said.  “You know a lot of stuff, and you’ve been through a lot of stuff, and you’ve seen other people go through a lot of stuff.  You… have a ton of insight.  So what you would do and what you think is important.  I’d be stupid to ignore a resource like that even if I didn’t like you so damn much.”

“Have I told you today,” Roy said, “how glad I am that you like me at all?”

That required Ed to open his eyes so that he could scowl properly.

Roy grinned back—but only for a moment before it settled into a more subdued kind of a smile, with a pretty big dose of wistfulness in it.

“Do you need to go into lab today?” he asked.  “Or can I make you coffee and trap you in the snuggle pit and ply you with documentaries?”

Ed knew what he should say.

And he knew what he was going to do anyway.

“Which documentaries?” he asked.

Roy was grinning again.  It all seemed fucking worth it when he did that.

“Let me put the coffee on,” Roy said, “and then you can pick.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [GIANT SIGH]
> 
> I'm back! And indescribably sorry that this took so long. The reason it did may be self-evident from the size of your scroll bar: this "chapter" is just shy of 32,000 words on its own. As Rainjoyous used to say, maybe make that cup of tea first. XD
> 
> There are a lot of Emotions™ in this one, too, although I think that overall it's slightly less intense than some of the previous ones!
> 
> Regarding the future of this fic: people who find the series and catch up sometimes beg me not to abandon it, but you really never need to worry about that. ♥ I'm more worried about what I'm going to do with my life when I DO finish it, because it feels like a really wonderful old friend at this point. ;__; In any case, the next fic in the series is drafted, but I want to finish the eighth part (which I hope to GOSH will FINALLY be the last one!) before I get it out to you guys, in case I need to go back and shift stuff around. So stay tuned! And also stay tuned for a metric crap-ton of other stuff in the meantime.
> 
> Thank you guys all so much, from the very bottom of my withered old heart, for being here and supporting this fic in particular – I cannot adequately express how much the support means for all of the fics, but for the ones that are deeply personal like this, it's a little bit extra amazing. I hope you all enjoy the rest! ♥
> 
> (Recap of last chapter since it's been a geologic age: in the present day, Ed changing his flight to meet Roy in D.C. during the trial left him with an extra morning in England, which he used to go pay Hohenheim a surprise visit in Oxford. In the past-tense storyline, Roy and Ed went on a brief vacation, which Ed had to work to reclaim from the way he had associated hotels with Kimblee. When they came back and unpacked their souvenirs, Roy found a GPS tracker hidden in Ed's wallet, which Kimblee slipped into it when he and Ed were at the ER.)

Heathrow bustles so intently that Ed can’t help wondering if he’s fallen into a sped-up video of an international airport instead of the real-time version.  It’s funny, about airports—about any nexus of travel, but airports in particular—how they run the whole damn gamut of human intention.  There are people flying out on the vacation of their dreams; there are people leaving for a wedding or starting out on the honeymoon to follow one; there are people leaving for weddings they _don’t_ want to go to; there are people on business trips that are either utterly perfunctory or stressing them right to the brink of their capacity for calm; there are kids on their own, slinking uncertainly after airport attendants; there are about a billion other children bouncing around, with their parents gripping their wrists to keep them from running off to the nearest kiosk and buying eighteen candy bars; there are people headed towards or coming back from funerals, and you can see it in their eyes how tired they are no matter what hour it is where they came from.  There are so, so many people coming home.

And then there are people like him, who are almost doing that, but not quite—who aren’t quite sure what they’re going to, but don’t have much choice except to suck it up and set foot on the plane and see where they end up.

Roy’s home.  That’s the thing.  Al’s the universe, but Roy’s where Ed lays his head at night; Roy’s where the lurching spin of the world finally stills, and everything stays quiet and makes sense.  Roy’s his sanctuary.  So wherever Roy is—

Wherever Roy is, that’s north on his personal fucking compass.  That’s where he wants to go.

That makes it pretty easy, right?  Well.  Damn near nothing’s ever easy; that’s the whole point of living.  But that makes it simpler.  That makes it _possible_.

Even after paying that visit to Hohenheim, he remembered to allot himself the recommended amount of time to get through security and whatnot, which—since he miraculously escaped without getting practically fucking strip-searched this time—leaves him with a full forty minutes before his flight even boards, and nothing to do except strategize about when to go pee for the last time.  People-watching is all good and fucking well, sure, but you can only do it for so long before the sondering starts to get heavy, and you start to feel _way_ too much for the people who look harried or upset, and you kind of want to go tip the cleaning staff even though that might not be legal, and…

And it’s probably a good idea to settle down near his gate with his laptop and shepherd his brain back towards the realm of the real, rather than the speculated histories of a thousand passersby.

He always worries a little when Paola titles emails “Don’t panic, everything is fine”—which is probably sort of the opposite of the point, but also secretly a little bit her way of trolling him.  He doesn’t know what the hell he’s going to do without her when she finishes her project—which is only a matter of a couple more months, probably—and immediately gets snapped up by the first university she sends her C.V. to.  She’s been talking, vaguely, in a wistful sort of way, about trying to find an industry job in Brazil so she can be closer to her family.  Which is ridiculous, because any university on any continent would _beg_ for her, and…

_Hi Ed, Nothing is on fire (not even a little) but Chris has a poster session this Fri. and was counting on you being back to take a look at his final draft before he presents.  I told him something very nice about planning ahead.  Attached it if you get a chance to take a look?  Travel safe! –P_

He opens up the attachment, which fortunately Chris—or, more likely, Paola giving an instruction disguised as a suggestion—was clever enough to send as a Illustrator file instead of a PDF, so that Ed can just make any changes he needs to and then send it right back.

Mostly it looks good, although Chris is reaching a bit with some of the interpretations of his data to make it sound better, so Ed nixes that shit before it can get any of them into water of a too-warm variety.  He returns the updated file and adds, _You are, as always, the best.  Tell Chris that he’s letting down the entire graduate student tradition by giving me more than two hours to spare, he needs to cut it way closer next time.  Tell him good luck too.  Or that he doesn’t need luck because he has skill and that he better not let the lab down, haha.  Seriously, thank you so much for everything and for holding down the fort; you make it so easy I don’t know what I did to luck into having you on board.  –Ed_

He skims through a couple more emails looking for major emergencies, but—somehow, miraculously—nothing urgent jumps out and slams a fist down on the hair trigger for his adrenal system this time around.

That’s something, right?  Flying is stressful enough as it is.  And if he gets too stressed about it, his immune system will tank, and he’ll be twice as vulnerable to all of the filthy contagion floating around in the recycled air, and then he’ll get sick, and then he’ll be _really_ fucked, and—

And there it is—there’s the pulse-quickening, heart-stumbling, throat-tightening too-muchness of it all.

At least that’s familiar, right?  At least the slow simmering of it under his skin rings recognizable.

It’s evening here, and he’s five hours ahead, and the flight is about eight hours long—if the jet-lag doesn’t kill him dead before he ever sets foot on American soil, Roy should be well out of the courtroom by the time he turns up in D.C., bedraggled as shit and extremely confused about the state of the time-space continuum.

And that’s… well.  The hard part isn’t over—not by a longshot.  The hard part is just starting, really, but it’ll be difficult in a different way than it’s been up until now.

He’d be full of shit if he tried to claim that he’s ready for it.  But he’s got eight hours of mind-numbing, flying-tube-trapped boredom to work on that part—and besides, when the hell has he ever been ready for anything that’s happened to him?  Life doesn’t give you time.  Life just deals out the punches, and you learn to roll with them, whether you’ve got your gloves on yet or not.

That’s something.  And Edward Elric has a knack for stretching _something_ into _just about enough_.

  


* * *

  


Sundays were actually a great time to be in lab, because nobody else ever was.  Ed got a lot of good thinking done when the only ambient noise was the machines burbling to themselves, and the fluorescent lights buzzing, and the fan on his laptop humming away.  There was something soothing about that particular little symphony.  It made his brain run.

After a good half-hour of gazing into empty space, he spun his chair around and started typing notes—and then he shoved the computer out of the way and started diagramming furiously by hand, because what if—what _if_ —

Two hours after that, he surfaced, and even then it was really only because his wrist ached so fucking much that he couldn’t keep scribbling.  He blinked around himself.  It occurred to him that he probably hadn’t eaten anything—no, wait, Roy had made him scarf down an English muffin this morning, with jam on it, and called him a cuddlemuffin and then said “You’re _my_ jam”, and then hastily relented when Ed started to pantomime gagging in a way that jeopardized his breakfast.  But that was probably the last fuel he’d given his brain, and his hands were sort of shaky, and…

He probably had a snack bar or some shit buried in his bag, and it was a good idea to check his phone and see if Roy had sent him any tragic, lonely text messages anyway.  Not that Roy wasn’t probably buried in case files in the living room right now, but…

But he might also have been thinking a little too hard about the small black chip-thing they’d set on an end table in the foyer—because it was plausible for Ed to have left his wallet there; and because neither of them seemed to be able to stand to look at it lying anywhere more prominent.

Ed dug out a granola bar, and also the phone.  He didn’t have a long string of _I’m on the verge of marathoning cooking shows if you don’t come home, and whatever ungodly dinner-creature emerges from the wreckage is your own fault for working so hard <3_ messages, which was… a bit of a relief, but also a bit of a disappointment, because Roy’s histrionics were bizarrely adorable when he really got going.

Unfortunately, though, Ed’s brain had changed gears: he’d shifted out of Theoretical Science and back into Real Life.  The problem with that was that it meant that he had to think—and think seriously—about this Kimblee shit.

The problem with _that_ problem was that he honestly didn’t know what he wanted to do.

Obviously he didn’t want this shit to go on—he hadn’t wanted it in the first place; he hadn’t wanted it at any point; and it had only ever gotten _worse_ and _harder_.

Was there a part of him that felt, viscerally, like he deserved it?  Like he was supposed to be unhappy in some way, perpetually, as atonement for all of the stupid shit he’d done, and this kind of slow, subtle, ongoing torture really fit the bill?

Probably.

But was the guilt the source of his reluctance to act and move and change this thing?

Or was it rooted deeper in… fear?

Roy was confident that they were going to take the day, and justice would prevail, and so on and so forth, and probably there’d be some inspiring end-of-the-movie speeches or some shit.

But Roy didn’t know Soph Kimblee.  Not like Ed did.  Roy didn’t know how fucking smart he was—how cuttingly, cunningly, _coldly_ brilliant; how determined; how intent; how fucking resourceful.  Roy didn’t know just how much there was to be afraid of.

It wasn’t that Ed didn’t trust Roy to give the damn thing a hundred and some mathematically-impossible additional percent—and it wasn’t that he didn’t know firsthand how clever and how convincing Roy could be.

It was just that the risk was bigger than Roy knew he was signing up for.  And winning the war could result in a hell of a lot more casualties than they would be prepared to lose.

There was somebody who could help him reason through it, of course—somebody who had seen just how dark this fucking pit could be; somebody who’d gotten a taste of the Kimblee’s special brand of slow-killing venom.

Ed looked down at his phone.  He took a deep breath and tried to talk himself out of it, but he knew—he knew he was too weak to stop himself from trying, at least.

He opened up his text log with Al and typed before he could vacillate about it and make it worse.   _hey you got a minute?_

He set the phone down.  Fuck.  Al was probably super busy with—

The phone started vibrating hard enough to send itself in a wonky half-circle across the benchtop.  Once Ed was done jumping out of his fucking skin—even though he’d been expecting a response—he snatched it up.

Call from Alphonse Elric.  What a fucking coincidence.

He swiped and then hit the button to put the phone on speaker so that he could pace around the room if the energy started to percolate too hard.  “I didn’t mean _now_ ,” he said.  “I meant whenever was convenient for you.  You were supposed to tell me what was a good time for you.”

“Too bad,” Al said.  “You’ll have to do a better job of disguising your intentions next time, since it was pretty obvious that meant ‘I really want to talk to you as soon as possible, but I don’t want to bother you’.”

Ed grimaced at the twinge of guilt that lanced through him, sharp like glass and white-hot for a long second.  “I _am_ bothering you.  I never fucking call you unless I need something.”

“You never ask me for anything,” Al said.

“I do s—”

“No,” Al said, “you don’t.  You didn’t ask me to help out with anything when we were kids—you just took care of me.  You didn’t ask me to get a job when we were in school—you just took as many hours as you could stand so that I could focus on studying.  You never asked me to put food on the table.  You never asked me to carry my half of the weight.  You never asked me to help, or for sympathy, or for anything other than _occasionally_ a shoulder to cry on and a ride to the darn hospital when your entire world was falling apart.”  He cleared his throat.  “So what do you need?”

Ed took a deep breath.

“Don’t argue with me,” Al said.

“O _kay_ ,” Ed said.  “Okay, okay—I just—shit.  Okay.  Um…”

Al was silent for a second, waiting for him, but Ed’s tongue had tangled up so fucking massively he no longer remembered what words _were_ , let alone how to use them.

“Take your time,” Al said softly.  “I’ll be here.”

“I know,” Ed said.  That had changed the contours of the knot, even if it hadn’t loosened it, so at least he could sort of stab words up past and around it.  “I—okay, you have to promise not to freak out.”

“Oh, heck,” Al said.

“Sorry,” Ed said.

“Don’t apologize,” Al said.  “Just tell me, okay?  It’s fine.  Whatever it is, it’s fine.”

“Kimblee hid a GPS tracker in my wallet,” Ed said.

This silence was longer, and different.  This silence was, in fact, _frigid_.

“Al?” Ed asked.  Maybe the call had dr—

“I take it back,” Al said, in a voice that bled sheer murder.  “It’s not fine.   _He’s_ not fine, because I’m going to _kill_ him—”

“That’s a little extreme,” Ed said.  “Al—”

“ _It’s not extreme_!” Al said.  “He abused you for months on end; and then he would’ve—we don’t even know what he would’ve done to you at the end; and then he stalked you for _weeks_ , and sent you things—and now he’s stalking you again?  What in the hell else are you supposed to do with a human being that absolutely, putridly, unreformably _wrong_?”

Ed swallowed.  He was starting to feel… dizzy.  He was starting to feel dizzy.  Which boded somewhat ill for having to deal with all of this shit upfront, in so many words, at the head of a courtroom full of mostly-strangers who were all literally judging him at the time.

Then again, he also still hadn’t fucking eaten anything today, which probably wasn’t helping.  If granola bars had been capable of glaring, the wrapped one sitting on the benchtop beside him would have been giving him the stink-eye in a major way.

“Roy wants to take him to court,” he said.  “And I think—I mean, I think that’s probably… well, Roy wants to file a restraining order, but we figure he’d contest it, so it’d end up in court, I guess I should say.  But—”

“You’d win,” Al said.

“That’s what Roy said, too,” Ed said.  “But the thing is—Al, he can _buy_ people.  Probably as many as he wants.  And there’s nothing he wouldn’t do; he doesn’t have a… a conscience, you know?  He won’t _stop_.  He doesn’t care.  And sure, the truth will out or whatever shit, but—he doesn’t give a fuck about the truth.  And he’s got fucking status, and money, and power that we don’t.”

“We have evidence,” Al said.  “I have the screenshots, Brother.  With date-stamps.  I have every last letter, dated and photographed and lined up and organized.”

Ed was going to have to look at those again.

He was going to have to look at them; very possibly somebody was going to have to read them, _out loud_ —in front of Roy, absolutely; possibly in front of an entire courtroom full of unfriendly fucking strangers who were going to make a decision about this whole fucking situation based on what they personally thought about the contents of those fucking _rags_ —

And some of those people would hear a ring of fucking truth in it, wouldn’t they?  And Roy would swear up and down that he didn’t, that it was bullshit, that Kimblee was a liar and a manipulator and that this was all part of the long-game offensive he’d started staging all that time ago—but there would be a part of Roy that whispered _God, that’s right_ , wouldn’t there?  There would be a part of him that looked at all the accusations with an unbiased eye and recognized Ed’s classless fucking ingratitude, the draining take-take-take—

There would be a part of Roy that sympathized, wouldn’t there?

There would be a part of Roy that had fucking known it all along; there would be a part of Roy that understood exactly why that shit had hurt Ed so fucking badly—because the details were blurry, but it was essentially fucking _true_ —

“Brother,” Al said.  “Brother—what’s going on?  Talk to me.”

Ed’s vision swam a little; he forced himself to focus on the physical contours of the phone on the benchtop next to his notes.  His left hand was clinging to the edge of the table, and his right hand was clenched in his hair.

“Fuck,” he choked out.  “I’m—it’s fine.  I’m fine.  God, I just—sorry.  I just got to—thinking.  I don’t know.  Those fucking—”

“They’re terrible,” Al said.  “They are unending slander and absolute dreck.  They are wrong, Ed.  They’re wrong about you.  He’s wrong about you; he always has been.  But they are also unequivocally abusive, and they make it extremely clear that he’d been trailing you for weeks after trying to hurt you.  That’s illegal.  He got so invested in tearing you down that he went too far, and that’s how we’re going to ruin him, Brother.  You and me and Roy all together.  We’re going to destroy him.  Okay?”

Ed made himself breathe in slowly and swallow even slower.  “Y-yeah.  Yeah.  Okay.”

There was a funny, floaty sort of quality to the silence.

“You don’t sound very excited about revenge,” Al said.

“I’m not,” Ed said, and as soon as the words were audible, he knew they were the fucking truth.  “I don’t care about—whatever, I don’t know, destroying him, vengeance, sending him to fucking jail.  I don’t care about winning.  I don’t give a shit about getting even.  I just want to get _out_.”

This silence was different—faint and sort of… breathless.  Like Al couldn’t cram the concept into words until he found the perfect ones, and if he blinked, they’d slip away.

“Brother,” Al said.  “You are—beautiful.  You’re beautiful.  You know that, right?”

“Uh,” Ed said.  “Have you thought about… glasses?  I mean, you’d look super cute in glasses, so it’s no big d—”

“You jerk,” Al said.  “You know what I mean.  Not that you’re _not_.  Oh, gosh.  Just—I’ll let Roy handle that one.  But you know what I _mean_ —I mean you as an entity, Ed.  Your—soul, I guess.  You’re beautiful.  The core of your personality.”

“I’m just tired,” Ed said.  “That’s really all it is.”

“You’re so self-deprecating sometimes that I don’t know what to do with you,” Al said.

“Stop arguing with me about it?” Ed said.  “Just a sugge—”

“I will die first,” Al said.  “I’m telling Roy you said that.”

“ _No_ ,” Ed said.  “The two of you together would be even fucking worse.”

“With the power of our combined positivity,” Al said, “maybe we can raise your self-esteem by force.”

“Eew,” Ed said.  “Sounds like Captain Planet.”

“Did you ever watch Captain Planet?” Al asked.

“Maybe once,” Ed said.  “I’m going on hearsay here.”

“I wonder if that’s what we were missing,” Al said.  “In our childhoods.  Saturday morning cartoons.”

“I don’t know if Captain Planet would’ve saved us,” Ed said.

“Maybe Batman,” Al said.

Ed sank back into his chair and stared up at the ceiling.  Was that a mold spot, or was it some residual smoke from the Centrifuge Incident?  “Maybe you’re trying to distract me from the bigger issue here.”

“Is it working?” Al asked.  “I mean—Brother, listen.  It’s your life.  It’s always going to be your life.  Nobody else has a right to try to make the call for you.  If you would be more uncomfortable taking this thing to court—and you might not have to; he might try to settle as soon as you filed the restraining order—than you are right now, dealing with all of this as it stands, then… don’t.  Just don’t.  That’s fine.”  He drew an audible deep breath.  “But it’s like you said.  If you ever want to be free of all of it—”

“I know,” Ed said.  “I _know_.  That’s the hard part.”

“It’s up to you,” Al said.  “It’s really up to you.  It’s _your_ life, okay?  You decide what’s best for you, and we’re behind you.  No matter what.  You can back down from this if it’s safer—don’t forget that; if that’s better for you… then that’s what we’re doing.  That’s what we’re all doing, and Roy and Win and I are with you one hundred percent.  Okay?”

“Yeah,” Ed said, leaning back against the chair.  He’d leaned just far enough to prop his elbow on the edge of the benchtop and drop his chin onto his hand.  “Okay.  Thanks, Al.  I mean it.”

He looked at—or, really, through—the side of the fume hood for a few long seconds.

“I just—” This was Al.  Al was his other piece; Al was the finishing touch; Al was the lynchpin that held him together and the seal that filled in all the jagged edges to make him whole.  He had to be able to say some of this shit, and Al was the person to say it to.  “I just—I dunno—yet—if I _can_.  You know?  I dunno how long it’s gonna be.  I dunno if I’m going to be able to be in a room with him for all that time without losing my shit.  And I already don’t look… I dunno, credible.  I already—I think they’ll… I don’t know.  I mean, he’s good at talking.  He can talk his way out of fucking anything.  And he can _buy_ his way out of anything else.  What if he just—what if they take his side, you know?”

He got several more seconds of intimate fume hood time.  His thoughts were churning so hard that it took him a number of those seconds to realize that Al probably should’ve been talking—and that if Alphonse Elric wasn’t snapping back an instant response, it meant that _he_ was thinking hard.

“You there?” Ed managed.

“Brother,” Al said slowly.  “Does—a part of you—a part of you really thinks this is your fault.  Oh, my God, Ed, you—you do.  You think it’s your fault.  Don’t you?”

It was impossible to tell over the scratchy speaker phone whether it was awe or exasperation, and that—

That lodged in the lining of Ed’s throat, and then it crawled inside, and then it _burned_.

“It’s just that I should’ve fucking—known,” he said.  “I should’ve—figured it out, and—”

“Known what?” Al asked.  “That he was a manipulative psychopath?  That’s the whole point, Ed—he’s good at it; he’s good at _hiding_ it.  That’s how he survives; and that’s how he finds beautiful, wonderful people like you who are looking for someone who just—cares.  That’s what he took advantage of—you know that, don’t you?  It’s what happened, Brother—that’s what happened; he saw how generous you are, and how lonely you were out there, and how hurt you were by what’d happened with Ling and then Greg and… he seized on the things in you that were the kindest, and he used them against you, and he turned you around so many times that you were dizzy enough to believe that it could possibly be something you’d _done_ rather than something that was done _to_ you—”

The inside of Ed’s head was like a whole fucking thunderstorm—flashes and pounding rain and echoing, shuddering sounds—

“But—” The last bit of the spiny thought of Al being tired of his bullshit jittered in his throat.  “But, I mean—I _let_ him.  I knew—I felt like—something was kind of—something was weird about it from the start, you know?  I knew… I knew that he was coming on too strong for what it was, and for what _I_ was.  I knew it wasn’t… I knew something was fucked up, but I just—I wanted—it.  I wanted—I was so fucking desperate that I just—went with it, and… And hell, Al, so much of it _was_ about sex—you _know_ that’s what they’re gonna say, and what they’re gonna ask, and then they’ll fucking know, and they’ll think I’m—”

“They’ll think you’re a person, Brother,” Al said.  “They’ll think you’re a person who wanted to be loved, like we all do, and looked in the wrong place because a master manipulator tricked you into thinking it was the right one.  They don’t wear neon signs, Brother.  There’s no way you could have _known_.”

“Everybody thinks they do, though,” Ed said.  “Everybody thinks they have it tattooed on their fucking foreheads, and if you don’t see it, it’s because you couldn’t be fucking bothered just to look.  People don’t want to think they’re just—there.  Anywhere, everywhere.  People don’t want to think it could be them next.  So they have to fucking… demonize you somehow, _make_ it your fault, and if some part of it is—if maybe you _did_ see a little bit of neon, and you just fucking looked the other way—I mean, are they wrong?  Are they really—”

“Yes,” Al said.  “They’re wrong.  You are the victim, Brother—not because you’re weak.  Not because you invited it.  Not because you’re imperfect.  You’re allowed to be imperfect.  The attack was not caused by your substandard self-protection—it happened because he _chose_ to come after you and do you harm.  That’s it.  Full stop.  End of story.  It is _his_ fault.  Brother, listen to me—you didn’t do anything.  You didn’t invite any of what he did to you.  And you didn’t deserve it.”

Ed took a slow, deep breath, closed his eyes, and… fucking tried.  He fucking tried to hear what Al was saying, and internalize it, and believe it, and…

It just wouldn’t… stick.

“Sorry,” he said.  “I just—I know I sound like a broken record; it’s a pain in the ass.  I just—”

“Oh, God, Ed,” Al said, and there was an undertow beneath it—a current of abject fucking helplessness that nobody who didn’t know Al as well as Ed did would have been able to hear.  “It’s—is it really—I—oh… God.  I always—I’m sorry, Brother.  I’m so sorry; I should’ve—I wish I’d—”

Ed’s spine went rigid, and his shoulder twinged in protest; he tried to tilt his crap excuse for a meatbag towards the phone to channel the sheer disbelief in the direction of the speaker.  “What?  Al—what the hell are you sorry for?  You didn’t do anything.”

“Exactly,” Al said.  “All of these years—all of our _lives_ , Ed, you’ve been sacrificing everything you could survive without for me, and… And when you need me the most, I don’t even know it, because I don’t know how bad it is.  I didn’t know how bad it got, because I just assumed you’d always come through somehow, because you’re my big brother, and you work miracles, and you’re the strongest person that I know.  I always just assumed you’d be okay.  And that’s— _horrible_ , Brother; that’s _horrible_ of me; that was lazy, and I failed you, and I didn’t even know—”

“ _Al_ ,” Ed said as fast and as loud as he could without yelling at his perfect-precious angel-brother.  “Shut up a sec—that’s not what happened.  That’s not it at all.  Okay?  I just—I kept it—away from you.  I did it on purpose.  I didn’t want to b—”

The ton of bricks duly slammed down on his shoulders, and several chunks of mortar shrapnel sprayed his face.

It was exactly what Roy had fucking said.

_You don’t think your pain is significant enough to bother me with._

“Shit,” he said.  “Well—listen.  Al, listen to me.  You know what makes me happier than anything else in the entire world?  When _you’re_ happy.  Okay?  So I tried to just… I mean, it’s not even that bad—it’s not as bad as you’re making it sound.  Roy’s been a fucking drama queen about it too, but it’s really _not_ , and the thing is—you being worried about me wouldn’t’ve helped, ’cause I just would’ve worried about you being worried about me, and…”

Al made a noise that sounded… pained.

So either Ed’s attempts to bail this shit out were going worse than he thought, or Al had slipped and hurt himself or some shit, which wasn’t really much better.

“Al?” Ed managed.  “Hey—”

“Brother,” Al said, and by the sound of it, at least he’d survived, whichever it was; “you are going to be the death of me.  You are.  I love you, but—you know what happens if you just give and give and push yourself down and let everybody else come first?  What happens is that you run _out_ of things to give to people.  You run out, and you get tired, and you get ground down to dust, Ed.  You run out of fuel, and the lights go dark.  And I’m not—you listen, Brother.  I’m not going to let that happen to you.  That’s what I want.  That’s what’ll make me happy.  Got it?  What’ll make me happy is for you to start making yourself other people’s problem, because you never do—not unless you’re literally dying.  You just carry it.  You just carry everything.  And you think you’re supposed to; you think you're obligated, and everybody does, but—dang it, Ed, the world’s too heavy for one person.  It’s too much.  And you don’t _have_ to.”

He took a deep breath.  Ed wasn’t sure he remembered how to do that.

“Most people—” Al said.  “Ed, most people draw lines.  Most people set boundaries and protect them like castle walls, okay?  Most people fight for their space, and they turn stuff down, and they tell people ‘no’ when they have to, and that’s _okay_.  That doesn’t make you a bad person.  That makes you a person who knows your limits and respects your own capacity.  I _want_ you to do that.  I want you to tell me to screw off if I ask too much of you.  I want you to stop giving stuff up for me.  I want you to spend entire weekends lying around on Roy’s living room floor playing Tetris and wasting your gorgeous brain cells.  I want you to take what _you_ want sometimes, even if it’s at the price of what somebody else wants, and I want you to feel a little bit apologetic, maybe—but not guilty.  I want the guilt to go away, Ed.  I want it to die in a damn fire.  I want you to tear yourself loose of all of it and know that you are _worth_ everything you are, that you have _earned_ everything you have—I want you to fight for your right to good things.  I love you, Ed.  And so many other people do, too.  And we just want you to love yourself.”

Ed put his head down on the benchtop.  It sure felt real.  His shoulder hurt and all that shit.  Then again, it did that in dreams sometimes.

“Shouldn’t I be paying you an hourly rate if you’re gonna life-coach me?” he asked.

“Oh, my God,” Al said.  “ _Brother_.”

“Sorry.”

“Stop that!”

“Sorr—wh… what do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say ‘Okay, Al, I know it’s a lot of ingrained habits and long-term psychological damage, and I know that it’s only possible to change that sort of thing through concerted effort and personal struggle, but I will try very hard to be kind to myself sometimes, at least, and maybe that will start to shift my worldview enough that it will help.’”

Ed swallowed.  He swallowed again.

“That’s a lot to remember,” he said.  “Can you… can you give it to me slow?”

“I’ll leave that to Roy,” Al said.

There was a long pause.

“Oh, God,” Al said.  “I’m sorry!  I’m sorry—that was awful.  That was—I just couldn’t help it—”

Ed laughed.  It sort of misted momentarily on the scarred surface of the benchtop, which he was still lying on with his cheek all squished.  “You’re… somethin’ else, Al.”

“For the sake of my own dignity,” Al said, “I’m going to assume that was intended as a compliment.”

“Always is, when it’s you,” Ed said.

“Okay,” Al said, “but—really.  Whatever you need, Ed.  Please, _please_ stop thinking that what’s good for you is necessarily an imposition on what’s good for everybody else, and therefore doesn’t matter, or whatever it is that’s backwards in your poor, overloaded brain.”

“My brain is fine,” Ed said.

“It’s brilliant,” Al said.  “I don’t know if it’s ‘fine’.  I don’t know if it’s ever been ‘fine’; you’ve always had a self-sacrifice kink that scares me sometimes.”

Ed let that one settle in good and long and awkward.

“Oh, dear,” Al said.  “I should just—stop talking.  I should not talk today.  Starting now.  You… figure it out with Roy and let me know what you’re going to do, okay?  Please just _let_ me help.  I want to.  It would bring me honest satis… happiness.  It’d make me happy.  Okay?  So talk it out with Roy, and let me know when you need me.”

“I always need you,” Ed said.  “Where’ve you been?”

“Right here,” Al said.  “Not talking anymore, because apparently I’ve got all kinds of trouble in my mouth today.”

Ed let that one settle, too.

“Dang it,” Al said.

“Whatever you did this morning,” Ed said, “do it again every day.”

“Like heck,” Al said.  “Okay.  I love you.  Talk to you later.”

“Love you, too, you weirdo,” Ed said.  “’Bye.”

Al was one of those horrible people who would wait for you to hang up first sometimes, so Ed reached over and tapped the button to end the call.  Then he stayed there, head still on the benchtop, and watched while the screen went dark.

What a day.  What a world.  What a fucking existential labyrinth, with spikes on the walls and minotaurs at every turn.

But he’d had worse.  And he’d beat the fucking game before.  It took a lot more than a maze with a couple of monsters to bring him down.

He’d always had a talent for surviving.  Nobody could take that away.

  


* * *

  


When he let himself into the house a couple hours later, something smelled seriously fucking good.  As he shut the door behind him—and turned the deadbolt, which wasn’t as paranoid if Roy was the same kind of paranoid and always did it too, right?—his gaze fell on the end table with the little black card lying on it.

Shit.  It had been pretty convincing to leave it there today.  It was plausible that he would spend the duration of his Sunday hanging around the house, or that if he did go out, he might leave his wallet behind and let Roy pay for pancakes or whatever shit.

But tomorrow he’d have a couple of choices—to leave it here; to leave it somewhere else; or to take it with him and bait the demon, to keep up the illusion of ignorance.

Footsteps proceeding towards him from the kitchen shook him out of the reverie before it could drag him too far, though, and he looked up and cocked an eyebrow as Roy came around the corner.

“What’s cookin’, good-lookin’?” Ed said.

Roy reacted first with surprise, and then with a burgeoning cheesy grin, which was about the best welcome Ed could ask for.

Not that he would’ve asked, obviously.  People got to thinking you were a fucking sap when you _asked_ for things like that.  Better just to set it up and wait.

“Nothing as delicious as you,” Roy said.

“Probably more nutritionally sound, though,” Ed said.  “I bet I’m stringy.”

Roy laughed, which still sent a zinging rush of endorphins through Ed’s brain even now—and God, he hoped that never stopped.  He hoped it never faded; he hoped it never got old; he hoped the deep-seated satisfaction every time Roy smiled like that just never fucking left him.

“Clearly,” Roy said, “I need to write more poetry to your ass, since it’s apparent that you haven’t seen it recently.”

“Just how flexible do you think I am?” Ed asked.

“Trust me,” Roy said, sauntering over to slip an arm around the back of Ed’s waist, which brought their hips just close enough together for Ed to feel the radiating heat.  “I know _exactly_ how flexible you are.”

Ed smirked up at him—not very far, or anything, but… at a slight angle, whatever—and curled both hands in the front of his shirt.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

Roy leaned in enough to breathe into Ed’s ear, which made him shiver, which made his spine arch, which pushed their hips together, which made his whole fucking nervous system trill.  “Is it important?”

“Unrelated,” Ed got out, “a wise, sexy asshole once demonstrated to me why you don’t start having sex all over the house until dinner’s out of the oven.  Unless you wanna have an orgy with the firefighters, I guess.”

“That sounds right up my alley,” Roy said.  “I have a few suggestions for things we could do with the fire hoses, if—”

“Holy shit,” Ed said, shoving him away and swallowing a laugh that was really too big to choke down.  “Okay, time-out.  Food first, raunch later.  Deal?”

Roy contorted enough to kiss his temple even as he pulled away, which was pretty impressive, actually.  “For you, my dear,” Roy said, “anything.”

“Gross,” Ed said.

“I love you, too,” Roy said, and Ed tried not to startle as he glanced over.

It was so damn bright and glimmering and glorious in his eyes.  The absolute fucking bastard; he was just so— _good_.

“Prove it with food,” Ed said, reaching out towards him—reaching for his hand.

And Roy got what he meant and reached back, because Roy just… always, always did.  Somehow.  It was staggeringly fucking bizarre every time Ed really thought about it, but despite the completely different lives they’d led, they’d wound up on the same wavelength by some kind of miracle of convergent evolution.

They made it almost all the way through dinner—which was some kind of a chicken dish that involved sauce and potatoes, which meant Ed was practically licking his plate—before Roy sat back and paused in the way that meant that he felt compelled to say something but didn’t want to ruin the moment.

Ed ate the last potato on his plate and gave up the rest for lost.  He’d been mostly done anyway, so pushing his dishes aside, planting his elbows on the table, and bracing himself wasn’t such a great sacrifice at this point.

“Just hit me with it,” he said.

Roy smiled slightly.  “That obvious?”

“You do a thing,” Ed said, gesturing in a way that did not illuminate anything about the thing in question, which was fine, because two could play at the mysterious-slash-obscure game here.

“Do I,” Roy said, completely unperturbed—and, worse, completely undistracted.  “It’s… the tracker.”

Ed swallowed, suppressing only a mild impulse to glance backwards towards the entryway—he’d been pretty prepared for this.  It was sort of hard not to be when he’d been letting it simmer on the backburner all damn night, too.  “What about it?” he got out.  “I don’t figure we should—break it, or anything, because that’d… then he’d know, but… it’d be suspicious just to leave it here, too, I guess.”

Roy’s faint smile took on an entirely different quality—a grimness.  Stark and cold and deeply unsettling.  “I was thinking the same thing.  The less he knows that we know, the better, I suppose.”

Ed drew a breath in slowly and let it out slower still.  “Yeah.”

The grimness faded into weariness, which was less disturbing but extremely sad, and Ed wasn’t sure he liked that any better.

“Ed,” Roy said, and he laid an arm out across the table, and his fingers twitched, and it was Ed’s turn to intuit what he was asking and offer a hand.  Roy knitted their fingers together fastidiously and then gently squeezed.  “I want you to do whatever makes you feel personally safest.  I’m behind you, regardless of what that is, or what it turns out to be, or how it goes from here.  How does that sound?”

“Cheesy as fuck,” Ed said.  He squeezed back, a little harder.  “Thank you.”

There was a trace of the roguish mischief in this smile, and Ed’s heart beat a little steadier just seeing it.  “Cheesiness is just one of the many services I offer,” Roy said.

Ed basked in that for a few good seconds before he unrolled the line of thought that had been tangling lately inside his brain.  “I think… I think what I’m gonna do is leave it in the lab.  It’s not totally implausible that I’d ditch my wallet there—or lose shit from it, or whatever.  I don’t…” He nibbled on his lip, but there was really only one way to say it.  “I don’t want it to be here.  This is—our place.  And that’s really fucking important.”

Roy’s grip on his hand tightened slightly, and the smile hovered on the brink of extinction again.  “And it’s not like he doesn’t already know you spend a lot of time there, I suppose; and it’s information anyone could find on the internet if they were even a bit determined.”

“Exactly,” Ed said.  Holding hands like a pair of soppy teenagers over their own damn kitchen table probably should’ve been weird, but Roy made a lot of things that should have been weird kind of not-weird in the long run.  Even Roy’s powers of anti-awkward probably couldn’t save the rest of this, though.  There wasn’t much of a choice except to brace himself, clear his throat, and jump right the fuck in.  “So here’s—the important thing, I guess.  If… if we did file a restraining order, or whatever, and he fought it, and we had to take him to court—would there be some way to make it so that we were actually in the courtroom at a specific time of year?”

Roy looked at him for a long, long second—somberly, and intently, and with that same indescribable depth of affection that always made Ed feel guilty and giddy at the same time with more or less equal fervor.

“Over one of the breaks between semesters, do you mean?” Roy asked.

Of course he fucking knew.  Another should-have-been-weird—a should-have-been-frightening, really.  Roy could read Ed’s damn mind like it was laid out in block letters in size forty-something font.

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “I just—I want to end this thing, but I can’t… if I put my whole life on hold for it, I could fuck up my career before it’s even started.”

Roy raised their joined hands, twisted so that Ed’s was on top, and leaned down to kiss his knuckles one by one.

“I will do anything in my power,” Roy said, “to make this less painful for you.”

He looked up, and there was something in his eyes—something _new_ , something dark and chilly and a little bit terrifying.  A streak of the soldier.

“Anything,” Roy said.

“Okay,” Ed said.  He pulled a little so that their hands would sink back down to the tabletop, and then he gripped Roy’s again.  “I… thanks.  For getting dinner, too.”

“Providing food is another from among the many services,” Roy said.

Ed was slightly surprised that he hadn’t wrung the life out of any of Roy’s fingers yet.  “Do you take tips?”

Roy winked.  “ _Do_ I.”

Ed freed his hand, shifted back, and dug around in his pocket.  He drew out the grand total of fourteen cents in change that he’d gotten at Has Beans after buying a pound of the good shit on his way home and laid it on the table.

“Keep up the good work, Mustang,” he said.

Roy blinked down at the pennies for a second before offering Ed an unreasonably gorgeous, albeit absolutely humorless, smile.  “Your generosity is staggering.”

“I try,” Ed said.

Roy’s smile softened like it was an inevitable thing—like the slow ascent of the sun in the morning; like he couldn’t have held in the warmth even if he’d done his damnedest to suppress the heat.  “Right,” he said, pushing his chair back to stand.  He reached for Ed’s plate, and Ed snatched it away in the nick of time and got to his feet, too.  “Can I interest you in another variety of potato?”

“Is it the kind that grows on the couch and watches documentaries until it gets sleepy?” Ed asked.

Roy was faster this time—his arm slung around Ed’s waist too fast to escape, and then he’d attained the prime position to press a kiss to Ed’s temple gently.

“You are brilliant,” he said.

“Eew,” Ed said.  “And why, because I’m tuned in to your terrible puns now?”

“Is that not the definition of brilliance?” Roy asked brightly, sashaying over to start rinsing his dishes in the sink.  “I suppose I’ll have to update my dictionary.”

“The Dictionary According to Roy would be a fascinating work of literature,” Ed said.  “But I think they’d file it as fiction.”

Roy was on a roll tonight: he darted in too fast to dodge and tapped a fingertip under Ed’s chin.  “The entry for ‘gorgeous’ is just going to be a picture of your face.”

“Hold that thought,” Ed said, clutching his stomach and making sure to grimace extra big.  “I’m gonna hurl.”

“Adorable,” Roy said, beatifically.

More often than not, Ed was pretty sure the bastard believed it, too.

  


* * *

  


If Ed ever wrote an autobiography, he’d probably have to title it _Ain’t Karma a Kick in the Teeth?_ or some shit.  Maybe something about how the Greeks had been right about a couple really important things—baklava and hubris, for starters.  Maybe something about how every time he let his guard down—every time he let himself get comfortable, every time he let himself take things for granted like the world would ever give up one damn morsel without a price—

He’d gotten pretty good at distinguishing the shadowy hours in the middle of the night over the years—there was a quality to the dimness sometimes, but the more reliable gauge was usually how gummy his face felt and how cotton-thick his tongue tasted in his mouth.  You got to be pretty well-fucking-acquainted with the difference between three thirty and five after a while.

He was pinning this one at about two forty-five—he would’ve put some money on it.  Well, he would have if he’d had much to spare, but that was a different problem, unrelated to the significantly more relevant one.

Roy had just sat up straight and started writhing against the bedclothes twisted around his waist, and his breath was so quick and harsh and desperate that it made Ed’s chest tighten just to fucking hear it.

“Hey,” he said, sounding bleary and half-dead even to his own ears, which didn’t stop him from reaching out to try to tug at the sheets binding Roy to the bed.  “It’s okay.  It—”

That was as far as he got before Roy was fucking _falling_ on him—both arms wrapping around him, dragging him into more of a clutching, clinging, seizing tangle than really an embrace.

“He’s going to take me with him,” Roy was saying—fast and indistinct through the hitching of his breath; monotone like a mantra, or a prayer.  “I’m going down with him; there’s nothing—I can’t get _out_ —”

His whole body heaved, shuddered, pressed closer against Ed’s, and the circle of his arms was almost strangling; Ed tried to wriggle just enough to get his throat away from the push of Roy’s forearm.  Roy’s face buried itself in his hair—between the sweat-damp heat of Roy’s body and the half-light, that was about all Ed knew for sure.

“I can’t,” Roy whispered.  “I can’t—I can’t go—he’s going to—don’t leave, please don’t leave; please don’t let him—”

“I’ve got you,” Ed said, putting some force into it now—contorting himself upward, guiding them both upright, fitting himself in against Roy’s side without ever lifting his hands from Roy’s skin.  This position was a billion times more conducive to coiling both arms around him and curling one hand into his hair—hard enough that Roy couldn’t not notice; hard enough that it might just anchor him on solid ground.  “Okay?  I’m here, I’ve got you.  Nobody’s gonna do anything to you.  Nobody’s taking you anywhere.”

Roy breathed, raggedly, for several extremely long seconds.  Ed could hear his heart hammering; Ed heard him swallow; but nothing else moved.

“I—” Roy said, but even the single fucking syllable succumbed to a rasping hoarseness, and he cleared his throat.  “I’m—sorry.”  He drew a deeper breath and let it out slowly, leaning his head on Ed’s.  “I—”

“Don’t be sorry,” Ed said, tugging very gently on his hair.  “Just be okay.”

He felt Roy’s slight smile first, and then the wry edge on it nicked Roy’s voice: “I’ve found the former to be significantly easier.”

“You’re preachin’ to the choir there,” Ed said.

Roy mustered something approaching a laugh.  “Sor… ah.  Hell.”  He held on a fraction tighter.  “I—think I need a drink.”  He paused.  “Well.  I think I _want_ a drink.  I suppose I could survive without one, and if you th—”

“I think,” Ed said, attempting to make stroking at Roy’s hair sort of vaguely encouraging or something, and wasn’t it weird that petting people had the same sort of calming effect on humans as it did on animals?  “That you should do whatever is even remotely likely to help.  Here, c’mon.”

He’d always been shit at the whole soothing-people thing when he thought about it too much, but Al had never pulled away from him screaming, so apparently his instincts weren’t bad as long as he didn’t overanalyze.  One upshot of the especially groggy stretch before five in the morning was that his brain usually wasn’t prepared to examine anything, let alone to go too far.

He ran his hand lightly down Roy’s back—the familiar soft-worn T-shirt was sticking in little pockets of cooling sweat, and Ed’s heart fucking ached, but there wasn’t time to dwell on it—before he used it to collect Roy’s right hand instead.  He curled his fingers tight around Roy’s, squeezed gently, and then started pulling on it to scoot them over to the edge of the bed.

“It’s fine,” Roy said, although he let himself be moved.  “I’ll j—”

“Don’t you start,” Ed said.  “That’s my catchphrase, and you can’t have it.”  He stood up and hauled Roy up after, and then he ran his hand down the front of Roy’s shirt again—completely unnecessarily, but it sort of felt like the right thing to do.

“Can I borrow it?” Roy asked.  “I can lease it.  I’ll pay interest.  Really, it’s—go back to bed; you’ve got a long day tomorrow; I don’t…”

“It’s already tomorrow,” Ed said, drawing him over towards the bathroom.  He put the dimmer switch on at the lowest possible setting, but it still sort of felt like it was scalding his eyeballs.  “I don’t want to go back to bed until you feel a little better.  So let’s get you a drink.  Or two.  Or whatever it takes.  Okay?”

Roy’s eyes were all sleep-puffy, and his smile was sort of faint, but he still looked like a million fucking dollars and change.  “It never fails to baffle me that you don’t think that you’re remarkable.”

“What I think,” Ed said, “is that nobody I’ve ever met would be able to deal with what you’re dealing with as well as you are.  And you deserve a fucking drink just for that.”

Roy pulled back on Ed’s hand, used the leverage to turn him in towards Roy’s chest, hugged him hard and tight for a long second, and then released him, crossed to the cabinet, and sat down on the floor in front of it.  He fished the same old bottle—or at least the same old brand—out of the bottom drawer and uncapped it.

“Is it gauche to drink right from the bottle?” he asked.

“It’s gauche to say the word ‘gauche’ at three in the morning,” Ed said, settling down next to him and nestling in close.

He waited until Roy had swigged and then swallowed before he snaked an arm around Roy’s waist and caught the bottle-free hand in his—which turned out to be a good thing, since Roy almost immediately coughed and pulled a face.

“Toothpaste and bourbon,” he said.  “A winning combination.”

“Breakfast of champions,” Ed said.

Roy snorted.  “That might be a stretch.”  He took another long draught out of the bottle, and then his shoulders sagged, and he leaned his head on Ed’s.  “Thank you.”

“For what?” Ed asked.  “Oh, shit, I should get you some water or something.  How much are you planning on going through, here?”

“I’m afraid I’m not sure yet,” Roy said, tilting the bottle so that the sloshing liquid sparked amber even in the dim light.  “However much is required to take the edge off, I suppose.”

The tiles were ever-so-delicately reflective, too.  And cold.  Ed curled in a little closer and rested his chin on Roy’s shoulder, squeezing at the captured hand.

“This one seemed different,” he said.  The glass of the bottle gleamed; Roy’s eyes probably would’ve if he hadn’t shut them for another sip.  “You… do you wanna talk about it, or…?”

Roy drew a breath and set the bottle down on the tile with a nice, clean, definitive little _clink_.  He wrapped both arms around Ed this time and set his chin on top of Ed’s head, which would—under any other circumstances—have been grounds to give him several kinds of hell.

But right now it kind of made sense.

“I’m not entirely sure yet,” Roy said softly.  “I’m not entirely sure I know what it was _about_ yet.  Just—Bradley.  A lot to do with Bradley.  This whole… trial, the whole thing—the deeper I dig, the more this starts to look like an ancient burial ground he’d been passing off as a city park.  And it’s not—it’s not my responsibility to deal with that, strictly speaking.  My job is to help the court decide whether or not he’s guilty of a petty civic crime.  The state of his soul and his conscience are more or less irrelevant to the matter of whether he’s been dodging his taxes or not, but—it—I can’t stop finding questions that I _want_ to ask.  Though I suppose they’re also questions that I’m not sure I want answered.  It goes too far down—and it says too much about who I was, and where I was, and what _I_ did, if… if some of the things that I suspect are… if he really…”

Apparently all you had to do to coax Roy into talking about his problems was wake him up in the middle of the night and pour him some bourbon.  Ed would have used that power for evil a long time ago if he’d known.

“Was he your commander or something?” Ed asked.  “I dunno how the hierarchy works; Al hated war movies.”

“Not directly,” Roy said.  “There were—depending on the era—one or two other officers in between.  But I was following his orders through them, and more than that—he looked after me, here and there.  He didn’t have to.  Hell, it was probably risky for him, although I suppose those types of risks roll off of you when you’re that high in the ranks.”

He paused long enough to assess the volume remaining in the bottle, which was evidently sufficient to offer up another long swig of its contents.

“This was still under ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’,” he said.  “I played my cards pretty close to the chest, obviously, but a few people scented a distinct lack of heteronormative compliance on me and took it upon themselves to punish me for the fact that they couldn’t prove it.  Bradley, to his increasingly tarnished credit—”

How the fuck could he still talk like that at three in the morning _while getting drunk_?  The man was a fucking marvel.

“—was more interested in my performance and my potential as an officer than in the possibility that I might have sucked a cock or two in my day.”

…never mind.

Roy sighed feelingly, which was a pretty good sign that the bourbon was kicking in, and reached his other arm around Ed far enough to trace a fingertip along the lines of the feathered wings emblazoned on the bottle.

“The point is—I’m not sure I’d say that he protected me, exactly, but I do owe him a personal debt.  And now I think…” Roy swallowed, and half-smiled, and then let it sink into a grimace.  “I think he is a different person entirely than the one I thought I knew.  I think he is a _bad_ person, by almost any reckoning.  And I think I am in very far over my head.”

“Jesus,” Ed said.  Coming up with anything else that even approached the situation was pretty fucking difficult at this hour.  The surreality of this whole moment was making it worse—sitting on the fucking bathroom floor with the lights on low, gazing hazily at the bathtub, tangled up with the cold-sweat-caked love of his life and talking about horrible shit that had happened in a distant desert some fifteen years ago.  What the fuck _could_ you say?  “I… I mean—once this is over, can you cut him off?  Just—not really have anything else to do with him?  It’s like you said; all you’re required to do is figure out this tax thing, and then…”

“I hope so,” Roy said, and the shudder that coursed through him rattled outward through Ed’s body too.  “It’s… I spend… so much time, _too_ much time, pushing all of this away—trying so hard to believe that it never happened, or that it happened to someone else, and that I’m not accountable to him, for his actions, for what was done… It’s like another lifetime, but—at times like this, when it’s _here_ , that’s when… I can’t… pretend.  That’s when I know; when I have to… When it’s real all over again.”  He closed his eyes and buried his face in Ed’s hair, voice so low Ed could barely distinguish the words from each other.  “And it’s too much.  It’s too much to do again.”

“I know,” Ed said.  And he did; he fucking did.  He felt it in his own heartbeat; he felt it in every pulse of his blood—not the depth of it; not the specifics; but he knew that _feeling_.  He knew the way the past loomed up and swelled and crashed like a fucking tidal wave right when you were least prepared.

He shifted enough to set his chin on Roy’s shoulder and nudged their cheeks together again.

“Could Riza handle some of it?” he asked.  “The trial, I mean.  Just—to give you a little distance, I guess?”

“She’s offered,” Roy said—softly, but the love swelled unmistakably in his voice.  “But I… perhaps _because_ it’s hard, I feel like it’s something… that I have to do.  Something that’s required of me, as a human being—as penance, I suppose.”  There was a bitter note creeping into the weariness now.  “Maybe that’s stupid.  I don’t know.  Where do you draw the line between self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement?  Intentions are constantly evolving; you can’t base it on—it can’t revolve around what you meant at the start.  At what point does tormenting yourself in the hopes of redemption start to be selfish?”

Ed mustered a weak smile for that one.  “If I knew that, I think my life probably would’ve gone a lot different.”

Roy moved, smooth and swift despite the circumstances—in the space of a single bourbon-stained breath, he’d gathered Ed tightly into his arms again.

“I’m so damn grateful that it didn’t,” Roy whispered into his hair.  “Please— _please_ —never doubt that.  Doubt anything else; it’s your right; you’re entitled—but never that.  I’m glad for all of the shit both of us went through if it was necessary to bring us here.  If it brought you to me.”

“Jesus,” Ed managed, wriggling just enough to reposition himself in such a way as to lower the chances of him kneeing Roy in the stomach on accident.  “I always wondered if it was true that sappy never sleeps.”

“Sometimes it takes a nap,” Roy said.  “But it’s a very light sleeper.  Just in case.”

“Just in case,” Ed said, reaching around to run his hand up and down Roy’s back a little more.  “Sap emergencies could happen at any time.”

Roy nodded sagely.  “One must always be prepared.  Like the Boy Scouts.”

“Only gayer,” Ed said.  “In our case.”

“Significantly gayer,” Roy said, tilting his head against Ed’s again.  “Which is exactly how I like it.”

Ed curled his fingers into the back of Roy’s T-shirt and let his hand rest against Roy’s spine.  “Good.”

They sat there, still and mostly silent, for what felt like a long time—moments?  Minutes?  Time passed differently in the muddled gray hours of the middle of the morning-night—before Roy spoke.

“Thank you,” he said.  “I think… we should probably try to get some sleep now.”

Ed rubbed his fist against Roy’s back without releasing his handful of shirt, which didn’t seem stupid until he’d already done it.  “Only if you’re sure you want to.”  He leaned in a little closer, even though there wasn’t far to go unless they started melding into one being.  That’d be a good start to a shitty horror movie.  Mismatched limbs everywhere.  “Only if you’re sure you’re okay.”

Roy drew back, fumbling to realign them until he could curl a finger under Ed’s chin, which was a five-alarm sap emergency if Ed had ever seen one.

“I’m sure,” Roy said, and kissed him—and bourbon and toothpaste and three-in-the-morning breath be damned, it was still fucking great.

  


* * *

  


The fact that Ed sincerely did not regret an instant of that hazy, horrible un-asleep time did nothing to alleviate the sheer fucking misery of the next morning—proper-morning, anyway.  When the alarm sound blared, Ed was sorely tempted to pick up his prohibitively expensive phone and hurl it at the wall, or maybe at the window in the hopes that it would shatter the glass and sail right out and splinter into smithereens on the street below.

Instead, he rolled over, buried his face in the pillow, and moaned, “ _Noooooo_.”

“God,” Roy said, voice rasping in a way that would have been sexy if it wasn’t for… everything.  Some rustling of the sheets heralded a blessed end to the noise, and then there was a beautiful hand stroking desperately at Ed’s hair.  “I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry.  When’s your class?  You could go back to sleep.  I could set the coffee machine to make another pot right before you need it.”

“You are the fucking cutest,” Ed said into the pillow, which would not have come out if he’d been more rested and/or more sane.  “Maybe second-cutest—after Al, but before puppies.  Even fuckin’ King Charles Spaniel puppies.”

Roy’s hand started kneading gently at his shoulder.  “Where do I rank next to corgis?”

“Jus’ told you you’re cuter than puppies,” Ed mumbled.  “No exceptions.  Kittens, too.  Don’t tell Al.  He’d go berserk.  You said something about coffee.”

“Give me five minutes,” Roy said, and smoothed Ed’s hair back to bare his ear for a soft, brief, very warm, slightly damp, utterly transcendent little kiss.  Then he slipped out of the bed and ghosted off into the ether, and Ed had little choice but to roll onto his back again and face the terrible, gritty-mouthed, sticky-skinned day.

Roy was such a fucking bastard.  He’d _deliberately_ infected Ed with the sap disease.  That’d been his evil master plan all along, hadn’t it?  You got the guy to move in, and you surrounded him with the virus spores, and then you just waited for it to multiply in his bloodstream—

Ed was going to accuse Roy of that and several other things as soon as the asshole had handed over the caffeine.

  


* * *

  


One of many unfortunate realities was that there were still some ills in life that coffee couldn’t cure—sap was one of them, yes; but overthinking was even worse.  Ed had been born with that one, as far as he could tell, and he was pretty sure he was going to die with it, too.

For a significant portion of the afternoon, he couldn’t stop rehashing the shit that Roy had said.  How bad was this thing?  How bad had things been in the war all those years ago?  How much was Roy masking in the making of coffee and the kissing of ears and the feigning of normalcy?  How much worse was it when Ed’s back was turned?

They were a nice fucking pair, weren’t they?  Two fucking idiots honor-bound never to impose their problems on anybody else, going through the motions of breathing deep and slow and even while they silently fucking drowned—

Ed couldn’t make Afghanistan not have happened.  He couldn’t erase Bradley from Roy’s past.  And he couldn’t make this case end faster to clear the guy out of Roy’s present before any more of the old wounds opened up and bled.  Those things were out of his power—out of anybody’s power—no matter how hard he sat there and wished like a five-year-old fresh off of binge-watching “Pinocchio”.

He had to focus on the things he _could_ do.  Roy was good at taking care of him—good at thinking about the little stuff, making gesture upon gesture of appreciation and comfort, ensuring that all the things that Ed needed to live were laid out easily in front of him so that he didn’t have to stress about surviving on top of the static in his stupid brain.

Was that what Roy wanted, too?  Would that be reassuring to him?  He was always thankful when Ed handled dinner, or did the laundry, or whatever—genuinely grateful and pleased—but it didn’t seem to come with the rush of fucking _relief_ that Ed felt when somebody lifted one of those tasks off of his shoulders.

And then Ed fucking had it.  It had been in front of him—well, consuming cells in his blood and altering their DNA and transforming them into fellow little monsters, probably—all along.

Roy would appreciate _sap_.

Roy would appreciate dinner, sure—but it’d mean a shit-ton more to him if dinner came with candles and and rose petals or whatever shit it was that people used to signify supremely gushy romance.  Roy would eat that up.  It’d make him feel cherished and special and all of the things that Ed wanted, and it’d be even better because he’d _know_ that this stuff wasn’t Ed’s forte.

Which… was part of the problem, actually.  The whole roses-and-candlelight thing was relatively straightforward, but surely there was more to it than that.  Like… chocolate?  Wineglasses?  They probably had wine at home somewhere, but it’d be better if Ed got a ‘nice’ bottle, whatever the fuck that meant, exactly.  And… linen napkins, maybe?  Where did you draw the lines to distinguish between what was _romantic_ , specifically, versus just sort of fancy?

“Ed?” Paola asked, which jolted him out of the reverie.  There were probably little wisps of it clinging to his face like cobwebs as he blinked.  If he was very lucky, she wouldn’t be able to tell what he’d been spacing out _about_.  “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, which was probably totally convincing when he sounded like he was still shaking the spiders off.  “Sorry, I was just… thinking.”

Paola smiled.  “In a science laboratory?  How dare you.  We don’t allow that around here.”

Ed grinned at her.  “Oh, yeah.  My mistake.  Won’t happen again, ma’am.”

He then proceeded to do a huge number of things that had nothing to do with swiveling his stool around so that she couldn’t see his screen, opening a private browsing window, and enlisting Google’s assistance with romantic dinner planning.  There was not a single largely unhelpful WikiHow article involved.  Pinterest was not uselessly consulted, either, since just about everything it suggested involved pimping out the bedroom or lining the bathtub with candles so that you could… inhale smoke while you fucked against slippery surfaces and tried not to get rose petals in inconvenient places?  Ed had no idea.  This whole thing was beyond him.

Which was—he kept coming back to this; it had a pull like freakin’ gravity—the entire point.  The difficulty was what made it worthwhile.  And since buying Roy an entirely new house and just filling it with fire hazards was sort of out of Ed’s price range, he was going to have to get creative.

He closed all of the stupid, unhelpful browser windows, trying very hard not to notice how many of them implied that the only reason that you’d ever stage a romantic night in with someone was that you’d been married to them for a while and wanted to rekindle some passion or whatever shit.  Was doing it for its own sake really that… alien?  It wasn’t that he was bored or something; it wasn’t like there was anything he was trying to _make up_ for.  It was just a nice thing to do for someone like Roy who had maple syrup in his veins.

And he wasn’t going to let some stupid Pinterest collection full of pictures of billions of candles and/or gigantic beds that he would definitely have not minded having Roy fuck him on make him feel ashamed of it.

He fished his phone out and texted Roy to set this plan in motion before he could even think of chickening out.  He’d always found that committing to something in front of another person before you were entirely ready was a great way to force yourself to follow through.

_hey you.  hope your day is about as okay as possible given the circumstances.  i’ll get dinner tonight, so don’t worry about it but give me a heads up when you’re about half an hour away from getting home?_

There.  Committed far past the point of backing out, but with a statement ambiguous enough not to ruin the surprise.  It was a literary masterpiece.  Or a text masterpiece.  Or at least a good start to this project.  Ed would take any one of those; whichever was most readily available.

 _You are a miracle,_ Roy sent back before he’d finished ruminating on which he would prefer.  _A very large miracle, for the record.  What I’m in the middle of may take until six or so -- and even if it’s looking like longer, that’s probably when I’ll throw in the towel.  Is that all right?_

 _don’t throw it too hard or you’ll break something,_ Ed typed out.  _and then riza will have your head and you won’t get any dinner at all.  sounds great though.  see you then_

Was leaving off the punctuation at the end passive-aggressive as a means of ramping up the suspense?  Oh, well.  Too late now.  And almost too late to pull this off in any case; a glance at the clock on his phone confirmed the sneaking suspicion that time had slipped away from him again, and it was already almost five.  He was going to have to get a move on in a minute.

In the meantime, Roy demonstrated how deeply distressed he was by Ed’s failure to finish the sentence by sending an excruciatingly long stream of little heart emoticons.

Eugh.  Success.

  


* * *

  


Eugh-success manifested even more distinctly as Ed strolled through the supermarket collecting crap in his cart.  He’d gotten them good steaks, because he figured he couldn’t fuck that up, and it’d be relatively quick; and he knew they had potatoes at home; and there was some bread that seemed fresh and smelled really nice; and Roy would, romance or no romance, give him shit if there were no vegetables, so he’d gathered some stuff to make a supremely unnecessary salad.  He’d also found candles in unreasonably large packages—which on the one hand was much more aligned with the Pinterest model of burning your house down; but which on the other was going to get fucking wax _everywhere_ if he didn’t find some stands for them, too.  This whole business was mildly stupid and not-so-mildly expensive, and if Roy didn’t enjoy the _hell_ out of it, Ed was going to mutiny.

First he had to find some fucking roses, though.  For the sake of efficiency, they really should’ve just swept up the fallen petals and put them in plastic bags to sell separate from the arrangements.  Then again, buying one of those bags would be tantamount to admitting that you were trying desperately to get laid, so maybe it was better if they didn’t have a section for that sort of shit.

They could’ve just shelved them next to the condoms, though.

…did they have a suggestion box?

Dragging a cart full of food and candles with a fucking bouquet like a Maraschino cherry on top did not, as it turned out, feature on the list of Ed’s favorite life experiences.  Especially when the young woman scanning his items said, brightly despite a blush big enough to embarrass them both, “You’re going to make some girl really happy tonight.”

“Uh,” Ed said.  “I… doubt it.”

She stared at him.

He blinked back.

“Uh,” he said again, fucking sagely.  “Never mind.”

Fortunately or something, his total on the register was so staggeringly high that he didn’t have any agony left to spare for the social awkwardness, and then he helped her bag up all his shit and whisked it out the door as fast as he could.  He had to get started on those potatoes, or he’d be stuck with _salad_ as their only side.

Even with the threat of leafiness looming, though, it felt—good.  It felt good to be doing painfully schmoopy stuff like this, purely for Roy’s benefit.  It felt good knowing that he was going to make Roy really damn happy in just a few short hours.

You could, evidently, put a price on that, since it’d just been charged to his credit card, but he would’ve paid it a thousand times over.

  


* * *

  


For once in his sad little excuse for an adult life—well, his sad little excuse for an entire life, really; the childhood part, such as it had been, hadn’t fared much better—everything timed out just about perfectly.

His precious potatoes were just coming ready; and if they didn’t waste too much time on the salad he’d set on the table, the steaks would be hitting a beautiful medium right when they wanted them.  He’d dug up wineglasses, and put out the bottle of mid-price-range one-of-the-red-ones that he’d found at the store, and he was literally lighting the last of the six-thousand candles when he heard Roy’s keys in the lock.

Which… left him with the question of what you were supposed to do when the moment you’d spent an hour and a half feverishly preparing for actually arrived.

He’d put on a nice pair of slacks—which were a little old, so they clung a little tighter to him than he felt comfortable wearing to work, which was precisely what he wanted for this occasion—and a blue-gray shirt and a _tie_ , which would make Al so proud he might pee himself.  And he’d barely just grazed the end of it against the flame on the stove even though he’d put it on before cooking, like a moron; but since it was black, you could hardly tell that it was singed even if you were looking, so he figured that was fine.

There wasn’t really time to do much except lean back against the edge of the table—carefully, because it might very well slide and drop him on the floor just to spite him—and fold his arms and wait for Roy to walk in.

The normal shoe-removal shuffling in the hall and a soft thump that might have been a briefcase making contact with the floor were the only delay in that regard: Roy took dinner seriously, which was one of the many things that Ed loved about him so much that it fucking hurt a lot of the time.

Roy also stopped short in the doorway when he saw their kitchen table decked out with a nice tablecloth and two candelabras and a bunch of stupid-ass fucking rose petals that Ed had tried—and failed—to scatter in a way that looked like the Pinterest pictures.  They had mostly clumped.  But he figured the thought had to count for something.

Judging by the way Roy’s expression shifted from shock to unmitigated adulation, it seemed like the thought counted for a lot.

“Oh, my God, Ed,” Roy breathed, and then he was stepping forward with an absolutely giddy expression—

Which crested and crashed directly into abject horror, which in turn sent Ed’s heart to the floor—directly to the floor, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

“Did I forget an anniversary?” Roy asked.  “Wait, is it—”

“ _No_ ,” Ed said, and Roy’s grin started creeping back, which bolstered the relief slowly lifting Ed’s heart up from the linoleum.  “I just—after how last night went, I sort of—I just wanted to do something nice.  For you.  That’s all.  No reason, no strings attached.”

The delight softened into something different—something deeper, something so warm and tender and gooey that Ed was pretty sure the honey would hold him down for… ever, probably.  Forever.

Which was marginally less terrifying a thought than he would have expected.

“I do believe,” Roy said, stepping towards him again, with even more of a spring in his stride this time, “that that is the single sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

Ed felt heat rising in his face, and it only got worse as Roy came close enough to stand over him, beaming.

“Whatever,” he managed around the sap-frog climbing up his throat at about the same pace as the flush.  “It—I mean, you do nice shit for me all the time.”

Roy gazed at him.  Rapturously.  It was disgusting.

Then he glanced over Ed’s shoulder—not that it was easy, or anything—and blinked.

“Did you _cook_?” he asked.  “Did you make _salad_?  Good Lord, Ed—”

His tone of voice almost made it sound like he thought it was a bad thing—people, i.e. Al and Win, who had been unlucky enough to taste-test some of the spectacular failures of Ed’s early culinary experiments would probably support that notion—but then he was sweeping Ed up into both arms and kissing him extremely soundly, and that told a rather different story.

Eventually, a time-out for proper breathing was necessary, and Ed attempted to stabilize his spinning head enough to seize the opportunity.

“The salad is probably crap,” he said, which was only the truth, “because I’m—”

“‘Opposed to it in practice, principle, and participation’,” Roy said.  “It looks lovely all the same.”

“Everything else is probably okay,” Ed said.  “But we should get started pretty soon, or else the steaks’ll be fucked.”

“And then I’ll be jealous,” Roy said.

“And I’ll be hungry,” Ed said.

“Neither of those sounds acceptable,” Roy said.  He tucked Ed’s hair behind his ears, leaned down, and kissed his forehead—possibly just to demonstrate that, despite the monumental effort, Ed still had no claim whatsoever to the Schmoop King’s hard-earned crown.  “Lead on, dear heart.”

“Me doing a cutesy thing,” Ed said, pushing past him—gently—to fake-storm over towards the cabinets, “is not an open invitation for you to go wild with the pet names.”

“Is it not?” Roy asked mildly, trailing a few steps behind.  “My mistake, darling.”

“Oh, _gross_.  Thin ice, Mustang.  Thin ice.”

“I’m so terribly sorry,” Roy said.  The bastard’s hand grazed the small of Ed’s back—in an extremely unapologetic sort of way, for the record—as Ed looked over the gamut of nearly-finished food he’d left on the counter.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.  “This is the behind-the-scenes part.  Go sit down.”

“I couldn’t possibly let you serve me after you’ve already done all this,” Roy said.

Ed eyed him.

Roy smiled.

Ed handed him one of the nice plates, very gently despite the temptation to shove it at his chest, and then poured them each a glass of water from the filter-pitcher-thing that Roy was having an affair with.  The fancy crystal glasses that he’d found sequestered at the back of one of the high shelves were difficult to shove at people without spilling everywhere, which was probably a good thing for Roy, who was courting a glass full of water down his shirtfront simply by existing.

“I made that salad just for you,” Ed said.  “I’ll be heartbroken if you don’t eat it.”

“I wouldn’t be able to live with the shame,” Roy said, sauntering back towards the table, “of not eating such a glorious f—”

“Sit,” Ed said.

“Yes, master,” Roy said.

Ed turned to glare at him.

Roy was, in fact, sitting in one of the chairs Ed had left at the table, albeit so exaggeratedly primly that the sarcasm of it very nearly negated the physical facts.

Ed glanced at everything to make sure nothing would catch fire while he pretended to give a shit about salad, actually gave a shit about potatoes, and also gave a shit about steak, and then he went to go join his stupid-wonderful boyfriend at a table covered in clumped rose petals, which were soon to receive a baptism with wax.

“So,” he said.  He pulled his chair in and debated the ridiculousness of laying a linen napkin across your lap in your own damn home.  Unfortunately, it was pretty evident that the whole romance-atmosphere-thing would suffer without it, so he had to buck up.  “How was your day?  Or if you’d rather not answer that—you wanna regale me with _Lord of the Rings_ trivia?”

Roy’s eyes lit up, and then his whole face followed suit.

“You,” he said, setting one elbow on the table to prop his chin on his hand, “are a miracle.”

“A big one,” Ed said.  “As previously mentioned.”

Roy grinned.  “Enormous, I’d say.”

  


* * *

  


Ed learned a lot about the Silmarils over dinner.  He also earned the unrivaled pleasure of getting to watch Roy savor good steak, which bordered on pornographic in places.  He had ignored all of the how-to guides that had suggested keeping the meal light so that you’d be nice and limber for sex afterward—although all of them had made significantly more euphemistic referral to that being the reason—because he knew how Roy felt about lava cake with ice cream.  Specifically, he knew that Roy felt overwhelmingly positive about it, and would eat it to the point of carb coma if considerable quantities were available.  He also knew that tonight was about making Roy feel like a million fucking bucks, rather than about getting laid—not that he would have turned it down, or anything; just that it wasn’t his primary priority—so he hadn’t been about to let that dictate the menu.

The lava cake won this round, which was fine: its victory landed the two of them curled up on the couch, Roy halfway to dozing, with chocolate on his breath, and Ed wrapped up in the circle of his arm and partly on top of him, which was about as good a place as a guy could hope to be on a Monday night.

Only something was—off.

Just a little.  Just a smidge.  But Ed had sensed it hovering at the corners of Roy’s smile, slowing the flashbulb instantaneity of his grin; he’d heard it once or twice when Roy trailed off at the end of a sentence or swallowed the start of one.  It wasn’t something big.  It wasn’t something critical; it wasn’t a _threat_.

But it was there.

And it made his poor stupid chest contract a little bit, because he couldn’t even… he must have done something just a tiny bit wrong.  And that fucking hurt.

He’d had worse, though.  He’d had worse, and he’d scrape through this one, too.

He took a deep breath and made himself smile as he nudged his shoulder back against Roy’s chest.  “So hit me with it.”

Roy probably didn’t even notice the soft noise he’d just made deep in his chest—a low, short, contented hum.  Did that mean—?

“With what?” he asked.  Then he shifted, wrapping his arms around Ed a little tighter, and nuzzled at Ed’s cheek and neck and murmured, much more suggestively, “Or should I say ‘With what, and where, and how hard?’”

Ed wriggled, but not with any real intention to escape.  This was probably a sign that Roy had domesticated him once and for all.  What an unsung fucking tragedy.  Hopefully someday someone would write an epic.  “Don’t make promises that you and I both know you’re too carb-loaded to keep.”

Roy made another noise.  This one was a piteous whine.

“What I meant,” Ed said before he could get going again, “was—tell me what you want me to change n… if… I did that again.”

Roy paused—though only in speech, since he was settling in to let his cheek rest against Ed’s temple.

“What do you mean?” he asked.  “It was—lovely.  Everything was lovely.  Particularly you, but I occasionally managed to pay attention to some of the other parts.”

Ed twisted around enough to make a face at him.  He’d apparently taken away Roy’s hard-won comfortable spot, so Roy made a face back.

“Whatever,” Ed said, relinquishing that battle in favor of marshaling his forces for the upcoming war.  He settled back to where they’d been, since this would be easier if he wasn’t looking right at Roy anyway.  “There was—it seemed like there was something… missing.  For you.  Something I should’ve done, or should’ve thought of, I guess.  That’s all.”

The silence was vaguely disconcerting, and then Roy’s arms slid around him and started to clutch him a little bit _too_ tight—so fast that Ed had to suppress his body’s instinct to flinch.

Roy burying his face in the side of Ed’s neck was a little more familiar, though, and he was relaxing before he had a chance to think about it.

“Oh, God,” Roy said.  “No—no, I’m so sorry, I—”

“What the hell are _you_ sorry for?” Ed asked.  Roy sounded alarmingly fucking sincere about it, too, which called for a little bit of lifting both hands and stroking at Roy’s forearms where they were crossed over Ed’s chest.

“Nothing was missing,” Roy said.  “Nothing was wrong.  Everything you did was beautiful and perfect and so very, _very_ kind.  I just—I felt—a bit—” He huffed out a breath and attempted at a dry laugh.  “I should have… I just couldn’t bear to bring it up when I walked in the door and you’d done something so staggeringly generous for me.”

The sharpness of the fear always surprised him, no matter how many times Ed felt it—half a dozen gleaming silver hooks burying themselves in the meat of his heart and hitching it up into the back of his throat—

“Bring what up?” he forced out around the swelling.

Roy hugged him harder still.  It was starting to make Ed’s shoulder throb, but he’d hurl himself off of a cliff before he mentioned that a time like this.  It wasn’t Roy’s fault.

“I’m sorry,” Roy said again, and every single iteration of that fucking phrase made the electric terror cycle faster through Ed’s veins.  “I was… researching restraining orders today.  And I printed out all of the paperwork you would need to file for one—I was thinking maybe we could sit down and look through it together and start to think about our options, and what you feel is the best course of action for you, and… then I walked through the door, and you’d done _this_ , and it occurred to me that filling out forms for a restraining order against your ex is the single least-romantic after-dinner activity I could think of.  And I can think of quite a few.”

Ed’s pulse beat to the same old familiar tattoo— _I’m fine, it’s fine, I’m fine, it’s fine_ — _oh, God, oh, God, ohGodohGodoh_ —

“Ed,” Roy said softly, and kisses ghosted over the side of his neck.  “Breathe.  I’ve got you.”

Ed focused as closely as he could on the sensations—Roy’s arms around him, the warmth of them; Roy’s mouth on his skin, Roy’s breath past the collar of his shirt.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Yeah.  Okay.  I—”

“Edward,” Roy said.

“Don’t you full-name me,” Ed muttered.

Roy very, very gently kissed his ear.  “ _Edward_ ,” he said, slowly and distinctly, because he was a contrary fucking bastard at the best of times, and Ed still loved him like a forest fire through his whole damn body at the worst.  “Tonight was perfect.  I do not—I could not _possibly_ —want anything more from you.”

Ed shifted around until he was settled perpendicularly on Roy’s lap, with his legs dangling off the side of the couch, so that he could lean against Roy’s chest sideways and close his eyes.

“If you’re sure,” he said.

“I am not surer of much in the world,” Roy said, “than I am that you are more than I have ever wanted, asked for, or deserved.”

“I’m gonna barf,” Ed said.

“I’m less sure of that,” Roy said.

“Guess that wasn’t the issue,” Ed said.

He tried to tuck his head down under Roy’s and close his eyes and relax—he really, truly, honestly did try, and anyone who didn’t believe it could fight him.

But there was still a long, frigid thread of adrenaline winding through his system, and he’d learned a long time ago that he couldn’t kill that with good intent.

“Can I—” He probably shouldn’t even say it.  Too late now that he’d started.  “Can I see ’em?  The—papers.  The forms.”

Roy gave him a melodramatic groan.  “Curse me and my compulsion to gravitate towards paperwork and fling it at everyone I meet.”  The bastard smiled, presumably because he knew it dissolved all of the cartilage in Ed’s joints when it was one of the fucking _sweet_ ones like that.  “You sure you don’t want to save it for tomorrow?”

“Eh,” Ed said.  He wasn’t, but that didn’t change the fact that: “Might as well get it over with.  At least looking at it, so I don’t sit here wondering what they need.”

He shifted again—to stand this time—but Roy’s arms looped around his waist.  He made a face and tried to get up anyway, and Roy made a tragic noise and hauled backwards to pull him back onto the couch.

“The fuck, Roy?” Ed asked.  It was hard to keep the sounds distinct when he was choking on a bubble of laughter, but he gave that his best shot, too.  “Fucking Cuddle Creature from the Black Lagoon here—”

Roy snickered.  “Can I add that to my business card?”  He also didn’t stop tussling and dragging Ed back down onto the couch every time he threw his weight forward and tried to flail out of reach— “I’ll credit you.  Include it as a quote—tell them to email you with questions—”

“ _Roy_ ,” Ed said—or, rather, gasped, because his diaphragm was not enjoying this position overmuch.  “I just wanna _look_ —”

Roy released him—but carefully, so that he stumbled upright instead of hurling his own body forward into the coffee table and cracking open the tender scar on his forehead or some shit.

“All right, all right,” Roy said, but his smile fell lopsided, and Ed’s heart lurched again.  “I didn’t mean to—”

“I mean,” Ed said, “if you don’t—think it’s a good idea, or… if you _don’t_ want to—”

Roy was up on his feet in another instant, and his hands settled on either side of Ed’s jaw.

“You care a lot about what I want,” he said.  “I love you for that—among the billions upon billions of other things.  But consider that I care just as much about what you want as you do when it comes to me.  Even if I didn’t adore you past any hope of quantitative measurement, I respect you immensely.  What you want, and what would make you comfortable, is important to me.  I will always, _always_ be happy to negotiate between what you want and what I want on the occasions that they’re not the same.  And if I try to tell you what to want, I want you to tell me to shove it up my ass.”

Ed swallowed.  Then he swallowed again.

“Okay,” he said.

Roy’s smile was stronger this time.  His thumbs ranged up and slid across Ed’s cheekbones, one on either side.

“Okay,” Roy said.

But then he hesitated, gaze flicking towards the wall.  The smile faded, and then he resurrected it, seemingly by force of will alone.

“I’m not him,” Roy said.  “I know that’s not what you’re saying—or what you’re feeling.  I know that you _know_ that.  But I also know that people leave marks.  They leave impressions.  And they teach us lessons, emotionally, that are very difficult to unlearn.”  He met Ed’s eyes again, intently.  “I care about what you feel.  I care about it all the time, and I don’t care what it _is_ —just that you’re feeling it.  If you think it’s useless, or stupid, or whiny, or somehow a waste—that doesn’t matter.  I still care.  I care about the minor annoyances in your day and every last tiny thought that flits through your brain and vanishes again.  Everything.  You matter to me, and your feelings matter, and you are never a bother, or a trouble, or a pain.  Never.”

Ed had known that all this time—almost all of it; almost since the beginning.  He had, and he did, deep down, logically, both when he thought about it, and when he just grazed past it on instinct.  Every time he listened to Roy’s heartbeat, he heard it.  Every time they were close enough for their breath to synchronize, he remembered.

But it was different to hear it out loud.

It was different to know that _Roy_ knew it—that he was conscious of it, that he was _aware_ , that it was deliberate and intentional and every bit as real as the feeble strains of optimism in Ed’s soul had always hoped.  It was different to know that Roy understood exactly what he was doing, understood exactly what he _was_ , and wanted it that way.  It was different to know that Roy thought Ed deserved this—deserved him, deserved the _best_ of him, deserved to be treated better than he had before, by someone he wanted so badly that he’d do incredibly stupid shit in the process of trying to stay.

It was different.  That was all.  It was different than guesswork and a fraction of hope.

“Fuck,” he said.  It was more than he’d expected to be able to get out, so he should have patted himself on the back for it, really.  “I—you—”

“Exactly,” Roy said, catching up both of his hands now and squeezing them gently.  “You, and me.  Besides—I’d have to abdicate as the emperor of cheesiness if I couldn’t find a way to make restraining order forms romantic, wouldn’t I?”

Ed stared at him.  “I think they make an exception for that sort of thing.  ’Cause I’m pretty sure even _you_ can’t handle that one.”

Roy’s grin tilted mischievous.  “You underestimate my power.”

“I thought we agreed,” Ed said, “that a hypothetical set of Star Wars prequel movies don’t actually exist.”

“Forgive me,” Roy said.  “What I meant to say was—you underestimate the power of the Dark Side.  And, by extension, my power, as a subset of the Dark Side known as the Dork Side, which extends to various and sundry corollaries including sappy romance a—”

Ed smacked his arm—nicely, sort of—and then grabbed his hand and towed him off through the kitchen to go fetch the shit from the bag Roy had left in the entryway when he got in.  “I’ll underestimate you from here to Granny’s place if you keep that up.”

“That sounds like fun,” Roy said cheerfully.

“Maybe a little more fun than forms,” Ed said.

Roy squeezed his hand again.  “Maybe a little.”

  


* * *

  


Ed was pretty sure that Al usually had a break around lunchtime on Tuesdays—and if he was wrong, and Al was in clinic or in the middle of something important, he just wouldn’t pick up the phone.  Hopefully he wasn’t taking a nap.  Hopefully—

The line clicked on the second ring.

“Hi, Brother!” Al said.  “It’s funny, I was just about to call you.  I wanted to talk to you about… something.”

“I wanted to talk to you about something, too,” Ed said.  “Is your something the kind of something that shouldn’t get said over the phone?”

“Not really,” Al said.  “But if you rescue me from this hospital in a couple of hours before I start to crack up, I’ll buy you as much coffee as you want.”

“Deal,” Ed said.  “Got a place in mind?”

“Whatever you like the best,” Al said.  “Isn’t that Ground Rules place okay?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “But Russell works there.”

“Russell?” Al asked.  “High-as-a-kite-but-much-less-fun Russell from Has Beans?”

“The very same,” Ed said.

“Is the world of baristas normally this incestuous?” Al asked.  “Or are you just lucky?”

“No idea,” Ed said.  “Sample size of one.”

“That’s poor data collection,” Al said.  “You should clone yourself several times and spread yourself to different states if you ever want to get metrics for the community in different environments.”

“Why stop at different states?” Ed asked.  “One clone can go to Italy and get the _real_ scoop, and one can go to France, and—”

“Excellent,” Al said.  “Let’s get right on that.”

“Sure thing,” Ed said.  He had to teach in half an hour, but after that his schedule was pretty clear this afternoon.  “You wanna do Quarto at two thirty?  That’s the one in the theater building.  They do drinkable coffee over there.”

It was the truth.  Leave it to theater people to have their priorities in order; most of the campus places served acrid bean-water with a weird aftertaste.

“Perfect,” Al said.  “See you soon, Brother.”

“You, too,” Ed said.

  


* * *

  


En route from class—which had taken a touch longer than anticipated because several of his tiny freshman acolytes had come up to him with questions afterward—to Quarto, it took a significant portion of Ed’s not-inconsiderable willpower to resist the urge to look over his shoulder after every step.

He’d put the GPS tracker in a locked drawer of the desk in his proper-office, since he basically used that little room as a horizontal filing cabinet by blanketing the desktop in piles of paper.  It was a theoretically reasonable place to have left his wallet, but it also made him antsy as fuck every time he was actually in the vicinity.  He’d taken some cash and one of his credit cards out of his wallet and shoved them into one of the pockets of his jeans (nice jeans, relatively speaking; he _had_ been teaching today) so that if Kimblee sniffed him out and watched him buying things at the register, it’d still be plausible that he hadn’t found the tracker yet.

And he hated it.  He fucking hated all of it.  He hated the paranoia; he hated how _good_ he was at wading through the worst-case scenarios step by step; he hated how easy it was to imagine what Kimblee would think, and try, and do.  He hated how fucking susceptible he was to the latter role in this stupid, stupid game of cat and mouse.

Was that part of why this was happening?  Was that part of why Kimblee found it so fucking _fun_?  Was he such a satisfying victim that giving chase was irresistible when he ran?

He knew—logically, rationally, on an objective level—that he shouldn’t think about it that way.  He knew it was never the fault of the person who was being fucking attacked by another human being.  He knew that.  He did.

But somehow—

Somehow it still just—

Somehow he still fucking felt like he was to blame.

Like if he hadn’t let Kimblee treat him like that before—

Like if he hadn’t been so easy to step on, to push around, to seduce and to claim and to toy with—

Like if he hadn’t accepted every invitation so eagerly that it set a precedent for reaching in and gouging all the deepest parts of him—

Like if he hadn’t rolled over and taken everything that he’d been given just for the sake of being _wanted_ for a while—

His heart slammed in his ears; his breath quickened and his throat went tight—

The black-lettered sign over the double doors swam until he couldn’t differentiate the Q from the U from the A, and his ankles tried to tangle up and topple him over and introduce his face to the cutesy little cobblestone path.

He stopped.  He raised his hands to the strap of his laptop bag where it slanted across his chest; he curled both fists around it tightly and closed his eyes and focused on drawing in one breath, and counting it out, and releasing it really slow.

Roy would have something to say about that—about the thing he’d just been thinking.

Roy would say _You are not weak for believing in people.  You are not weak for trying to trust everyone as much as they can trust you.  You are not weak for holding your heart open even when it’s gotten you wounded so many times.  That is the strongest thing I can think of.  That is decent, and wonderful, and pure.  Don’t let the sad, cynical people make you feel ashamed of it.  You are more than them.  You are fighting every day for the right to believe in a better world.  What’s shameful about that?_

Holding a fragment of Roy’s voice in his head was almost as good as holding Roy’s hand—almost as stabilizing.  It grounded him enough to take a few more deep breaths, blink the haze out of his vision, focus on the word above the coffee shop doors, and coax his body back into motion.

A quick scan of the tables scattered around the shop did not reveal Al—but the place was so packed with sunken-eyed students jonesing for caffeine that he had to do a second, longer, more-thorough scan to be sure.  That turned out to be a plus, since it revealed a tiny little table in the back corner that he hadn’t noticed the first time, which was the only one still open.

There were seven or eight people in line, so he zipped over to it and dropped into one of the two chairs before anybody could jack his spot.

The extra-tired-looking student at the end of the line glared at him.  He raised an eyebrow and smiled innocently back.  He’d been there.  It was somebody else’s turn to be the bottom of the food chain around here.

A spark of light off of fluffy gold hair through the front window was his only warning that Al was about to burst in like a ray of sunshine personified.  Al’s eyes ranged over the patrons, and Ed raised his arm as the world’s best gaze panned towards him—which paid off when it caught, and a grin split Al’s face and lit it up so brightly that the sun would have been _jealous_ at this point.

Al made a gesture that looked like lifting an imaginary cup and sipping from it, then pointed at the line—Ed hadn’t spent all those years reading Al’s mind for nothing; he was asking if Ed had ordered for them yet.  Ed shook his head, then fished out the cash in his pocket and held it up, waving it a little, so Al would know that he’d intended to pay.  Al made a face at him; Ed made a face back; Al stepped into line.

What a jerk.

Ed loved him more than the moon and the stars and the unfolding tenets of the universe.

Two minutes of awkwardly trying to decide whether to do a negligibly brief amount of work or wait in case Al wanted to have more pantomime conversations later, the beautiful brother in question was navigating a zigzagging path over to the table where Ed was sitting, bearing two steaming cups and a shirt-pocket crammed full of sugar packets and stir sticks.

“Before I let you have this,” Al said, raising the cup whose darker-colored contents demonstrated that it hadn’t been adulterated by dairy products, “how much caffeine have you already had today?”

“Not enough,” Ed said, reaching for it.

Al raised it out of reach, miraculously managing not to spill a drop on himself, the hipster at the next table, or the floor.  “Your definition of ‘not enough’, or normal people’s?”

“Ouch,” Ed said, making a point of collapsing on the table in abjection.  “Thanks for the reminder that even my most beloved family members think I’m a freak.”

Al rolled his eyes, pushed Ed’s cup into his miserably-lolling hand, and sat down.  “You know that’s not what I meant.”

Ed sat up, Al dumped the sugar packets onto the table and handed him a stir stick, and Ed tried to get him to take some of the cash.  He wouldn’t.  But he smiled, which was almost as good.

“So,” Al said, emptying two packets of sugar into his cup at once.  “I think… you should go first.  I need to work up to mine a little.”

Ed wrinkled his nose.  “Mine’s not exactly fun shit, Al.”

Al blinked at him, much too incisively.  “Is it about Kimblee?”

Ed’s stomach lurched.  Maybe coffee wasn’t such a good idea after all.  “Yeah.  It—yeah.”

Al stared down at his coffee for a second as he stirred it into a little vortex.  When he looked up, his eyes were—cold.  They were cold, and there was fucking murder in them, and if Ed hadn’t known it wasn’t meant for him—

Shit.  He was scared either way.

“We can take him,” Al said.  “We _can_.”  He took a deep breath, and the vicious edge faded as the weariness settled in.  “If that’s what you want.  I only want to do what you want, Brother.  I mean that.”

Ed sat back and watched the steam twirling up from the surface of his elixir of life.  “That’s what Roy said, too.  But he… he got me the forms.  For filing a restraining order.  And he said it’s like—it’s not quite like a trial, or at least not right off the bat.  You do the forms, and then you file them, and then you get assigned a hearing date, and then you have to serve new forms with the date on them to the person you’re filing it against.  And then you both show up on that day and fight it out in front of the judge.  But there isn’t, like, a whole… jury, or anything.  If it’s pretty cut and dry, the judge just kinda decides and then sends you on your merry-ass way.”

“I know,” Al said calmly, still stirring.  “I looked it up.”

Ed grimaced as his guts twisted up even fucking tighter.  “Oh.  I… didn’t.  I just—”

Al’s smile stopped him from fumbling for the rest of the words he’d intended to string onto that sentence.  “It’s okay, Brother.  It’s harder for you—the details are.  All of it, but especially the little… fiddly parts.  And the legal stuff.  All that stuff makes it concrete and serious-sounding and very _real_ , and… and it’s already been too real for too long for you.  I wasn’t trying to criticize you at all.  I just… I’m with you.  Okay?  I’m with you, and we’re on the same page, and I checked it out in case you would need to know.”

“I don’t deserve you,” Ed said.

“Hush your mouth,” Al said.  “The only person in this whole scenario who didn’t deserve someone is the one whose butt we’re gonna start keeping more than a hundred yards from you at all times.”

Ed’s heart started to fucking gallop again at the mere mention—

But maybe he could drown those thoughts in coffee, or at least distract himself from them by burning his tongue.

He succeeded at the burning part.  The rest was less immediately clear.

“I guess—” He tried—and failed—to suppress a wince, more at the burn than the topic, although it was a little bit of both.  “I guess I’ll need your… witness stuff.  Statement or testimony or whatever.  If you’ve still got some of the pictures.”

Al’s eyebrows popped up.  “I have them organized by date, and also by topic, and also by severity.  And I have hardcopies I printed out at Kinko’s just in case something happened to my files.  And I have them on a USB stick in case my laptop and my external hard-drive fail.  Is there a page limit on how much evidence I can present?”

Ed’s heart was still beating too hard, and now it was also squeezing too tight.  “I dunno.  You’re the one who read about it.”

Al smiled at him—gently, so he must’ve known there were some dangerous conditions inside of Ed’s ribcage.  “Point is… whatever you need, Brother, you’ve got it.  Okay?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  He took a deep breath, and then he used it to blow on the surface of the coffee.  “So that’s… my shit.  What’s yours?”

Al started to smile much bigger and brighter than a second ago, which was… interesting?  Promising, or something.  Good news was what Ed always wanted from Al; good news was all Ed ever wanted from him.

“Oh, dear,” Al said.  “This is going to be… this is unfortunate.  It’s a very awkward segue.  But I guess… Well, life is awkward.  It happens.”

Ed grinned at him.  “You gonna sit there and squirm, or you gonna tell me?”

Al sputtered, so Ed chanced a sip of his coffee to celebrate the victory.

“I’m—” Al huffed out an adorable little nervous laugh.  “I’m thinking of proposing to Winry.”

Ed choked on the coffee.

Which neatly added _the entire surface area of his esophagus_ to the list of parts of his body that he’d burned today.

Al had covered his face with both hands and was peeking through his fingers when Ed managed to blink away the worst of the agony and drag in a ragged breath.

“Sorry,” Al squeaked.  “I didn’t—I mean—”

“Nah,” Ed rasped out.  He coughed.  That hurt.  Shit.  “Nah, it’s not… I mean, it’s not a _surprise_ —you saying it was, but the concept isn’t.  You guys make so much sense.”

Al’s hands lowered slowly, but his grin broadened fast.  “Well… I’ve always… felt like that.  Like something about it was just kind of fundamentally… balanced.  Like it was really _right_.  But—you think so, too?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “You two are like fuckin’… peanut butter and jelly.”

Al paused.  “I’m the jelly, aren’t I?  Why do I already know that?”

“Because she’s salty,” Ed said.  “And dealing with her can be sort of smooth or sorta crunchy depending on what kind of mood she’s in.  And dogs like her.  Whereas you’re always sweet, and—”

“Fruity?” Al asked.  “Better on toast?”

“Yeah,” Ed said, completely straight-faced.  “And everybody else should be jelly that you’re my brother and not theirs.”

Al stared at him.

And then Al laughed, only a little bit in horror.

“Oh, _gross_ ,” he said.  “Roy’s gotten to you after all.  We’re doomed.  We’re all doomed.”

“Pity,” Ed said.  He considered letting the rest of his coffee go cold and then presumably rot in hell, but he kind of needed its beautiful caffeine load in his bloodstream whether it thirsted for his blood or not.  He took a much smaller sip much more slowly this time.  “So—what?  You got a ring?  You got an idea yet?  Top of the Ferris Wheel?  Middle of a restaurant?  What’s the plan, Romeo?”

Al looked slightly pained.  “Can I at least be Orlando?  From _As You Like It_?  He’s much more successful and much nicer and doesn’t die.”

“And he writes crappy poetry and sticks it up on defenseless trees,” Ed said.  “That could be your proposal plan.  Y’know, do a scavenger hunt through the park or something, and pretend you don’t know what it is, and then the last one could tell her to turn around, and then you could whip out the ring.”

Al was grinning.  And also blushing.  Ed hoped that any eligible people in this coffee shop attracted to men were seeing this and recognizing how damn lucky Winry was.  “That would actually be… disgustingly cute.  Roy really _has_ been rubbing off on you.”

Ed bit his lip hard and just barely held back _You don’t know the half of it, and I don’t intend for you to find out_.  “I’m trying to think like you,” he said instead.  “That’s all.  I guess it helps that both of you are the same kind of freakin’ sap.”

“I think we’re slightly different varieties,” Al said, “harvested in different parts of Canada and the northern United States, but I will grant that we do have a lot in common.”  He cleared his throat and then poured some coffee down it.  “To answer your question, though… well.  No.  I don’t have much of anything.  I’m not even sure I could really afford a ring—how much _are_ those?  I don’t know why I just asked you that; I don’t feel like you’ve done a lot of research in that regard.”

“You know me,” Ed said.  “And my obsession with bling.  And ice.  And whatever else the kids and the rappers are calling it these days.”

“Dry ice, maybe,” Al said.  “For your samples.”

Ed pointed one finger-gun at him and winked confirmation.

Al smiled back—but then he sighed, shoulders slumping a little.  “I think they’re obscene most of the time.  The prices, I mean.  And I guess that’s okay; I wasn’t thinking of doing it, like, tomorrow.  I just… the thought occurred to me, and it felt so… _big_ that I wanted to talk it over with someone.  And you’re the only person who could ever really understand.”  The smile came back, slow and soft and heartbreakingly gentle.  “You know that, right?  You’re my lifeline, Brother.  You really are.”

Ed swallowed a strange, inexplicable little sticky thing in his throat.  Probably it was some burnt-ass dead skin from the coffee encounter sloughing off.  Yeah.  That sounded about right.  “Well—you know you’re mine, too.  Anyway, when _are_ you gonna do it?”

Al’s face crinkled up adorably.  “Whenever I can afford to get her a nice rock, I guess?  I mean, I don’t know if it’d be a good idea to get married until I’m a little closer to graduating—I don’t want to wait until afterward, because that sounds like _forever_ —but I don’t see anything wrong with a slightly longer engagement.”

Ed stared at him.

Al stared back.

Then Al’s face crinkled up even more.

“When did we get to be the kind of people who say stuff like ‘get married’ and ‘engagement’?” Al asked.  “Oh, my gosh, Ed; we’re _grownups_.  We tried so hard to stop it, but it won.”

Ed raised an eyebrow at him.  “It doesn’t win unless we let it win.  We can have a water gun fight at your wedding if you want to.  That’s the secret.”

Al blinked.  “Water guns… are the secret to immortality?  I mean, you’re the one working on the life-saving super-science, so—”

Ed couldn’t help laughing.  “You know what I _mean_ , Al.”

“Yeah,” Al said, grinning back.  “And I know Winry’d obliterate us all even if her dress had a six-foot train.”

Ed shuddered at the mental image of Winry descending on her hapless guests like a tulle-wreathed avenging angel, dual-wielding Super Soakers with a maniacal grin.  “Maybe let’s nix the water gun fight.  Anyway—I mean, I know you wouldn’t’ve said anything unless you were pretty sure, but…” He glanced down at his coffee cup and swiveled it around.  “How sure is pretty sure?”

Al smiled, slightly dreamily, at the thin air off to the left of him.  “I mean… I’ve known since very early on that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her—that I want to be a partner in all of the wonderful things she does, and be with her, and behind her, and supporting her, you know?  I know I don’t ever want anybody else.”  He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, pushing at the end of his stir stick with one outstretched finger.  “I just don’t know if it’s fair to make _her_ have to decide the same thing.  You know what I mean?  I don’t know if it’s fair to tie her down when… she still has so many incredible things left to do, and be, and become, and… I don’t want to force her to choose me over a life she might like better.”

Ed leaned forward, looking directly at Al until the little dumbass met his eyes.

“Listen to me,” Ed said.  “It is an insult to Winry’s intelligence for you to think for a _second_ that she’s dumb enough to turn you down.  She knows what she’s got.  She’s knows it’s never gonna be any better than you, and it’s never gonna get any better than the two of you together, making shit happen.  If she doesn’t get that, somehow, she doesn’t deserve you anyway.  Okay?”

A little line of concern dug itself in between Al’s eyebrows as they drew towards each other.  “Well—I don’t know if that’s fair; I think—I mean, if she outgrows me, that’s her prerog… What?  Why are you—what’s that look for?”

“How the hell,” Ed said, “is anybody supposed to outgrow _you_ when you’ve been forty-five since you were eight?”

Al pouted, which admittedly made him look much closer to the latter.  “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

“You should,” Ed said.  “As far as I can tell, most of the people who’d try to compete with you for Winry are stuck at eighteen-and-a-half until further notice.  And she’s way too damn smart to find that attractive.  She fucking _loves_ you, Al.  That’s the point.”

Al swilled his coffee, gazing off into the middle distance again.  “I know.  And all I want is for her to be happy, and deep down I know that I _make_ her happy, and that that’s what she wants for me, too, and… But it’s… scary, at the same time.  The idea of forever-no-matter-what has never bothered me at all; I’ve always had a gut feeling that this was it.  But putting a label on it is still a little… it somehow makes it feel like there’s something specific to ruin, or to lose.”

“Think about it this way,” Ed said.  “It’s just putting a word on the thing you already know—which is that you’re gonna be there for her every day for the rest of your life.  Nothing but the title on it’s really changed.”

Al drank deeply, breathed deeply, and smiled.

“Yeah,” he said.  “You’re right.”  The smile tilted into a mischievous grin, which was Ed’s only warning before: “In that case, when are you and Roy getting hitched?”

“That’s the thing about lawyers,” Ed said before the cold could reach back through his arteries and spear his heart from every side.  “You can’t make honest men out of them.  It’s a matter of principle.  And definition.”

“The word is ‘lawyer’,” Al said.  “Not ‘liar’.”

Ed leaned back in his chair and spread his hands in a revelatory sort of way.  “Say ’em both fast in a Southern accent,” he said.  “You think it’s a coincidence that they’re basically the same?”

“My beloved brother,” Al said, sipping his coffee, “you are many amazing, inspirational things, but a linguist is not one of them.”

“Shows what you know,” Ed said.

“I know you better than anyone,” Al said, smiling at him over the rim of the cup.  “Although I wouldn’t have to in order to notice that you’re trying to distract me from the question.”  At Ed’s expression, he added hastily, “Which is fine!  It was rude of me to ask in the first place, really.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Ed said.  “It made sense.  In the context of the conversation; in the context of… our lives, I guess.   Y’know.”

Al frowned.  “It was still a bit… invasive.”

Ed made a point of shrugging, even though… well, shit.  Even though the concept was currently squirming through his veins wreathed in tiny tongues of flame, and what he wanted to do was _writhe_.

“Whatever,” he said.  “The answer is—I dunno.  I dunno if… he’s the type, or he wants to, or he would, or… whatever.  We’ve never talked about it.  And honestly, I don’t _want_ to talk about it, because I think that would fucking terrify me.”

Al’s face did the slowly-saddening thing, which made Ed want to cringe, but he had to hold his ground.

“Ed,” Al said, “I am saying this with a great deal of confidence, and I want you to try to hear me—I think he would be any type in the _world_ for you.”

Ed attempted to squint at his coffee until a fascinating mathematical equation appeared upon the swirling surface, but he was ultimately unsuccessful.  “That sounds like exactly what he would say.”

“It probably is,” Al said.  “Anyway—anyway.  I’m going to drop that subject before this gets any more…” He waved at the table between them.  “This.”  Admittedly, Al’s beaming grin always had, and always could, make up for a lot.  “So what are you working on in your lab right now?”

  


* * *

  


Ed had somehow amassed a set of extremely varied and yet universally important emails by the time he got back.  That’d teach him to do ridiculous things like step out of the lab for a few minutes to have coffee with his brother.

Mostly, though, the emails came bearing good news—the department was going to let start rotating more graduate students through his lab, so for one thing, they’d have help with all of the work that he and Paola were trying to juggle; for another thing, if one of the potential PhDs enjoyed their particular sort of chaos, that help might end up being semi-permanent if somebody decided to join.  Also, Amir had personally invited him to give a departmental seminar, which was awesome and fucking stressful in about equal measure; and some analysis they’d sent out to a place in the UK that specialized in several of the lesser-known CRISPR techniques had just returned the results, so he suddenly had a shit-ton of data to analyze on top of all of the other administrative crap he now had to think about—and was PowerPoint or Keynote considered more professional?  Was he too early in his career to throw in some stupid-funny transitions or jokes or whatever shit?  Would—

He’d opened a reply to all three of the biggest bonfire emails and written about a sentence in each one—hopefully the right first sentence for each window—when his phone buzzed in his pocket.  He drew a breath, held it, tried to grapple for the trailing ends of his train of thought, snagged them, jotted down another line or two in the email to the department admin who needed a description of his lab to try to sell it to potential rotating students, and then fished his phone out to check the screen.

 _How do leftovers from last night sound to you?_ Roy was asking.   _I think I could remix them into steak fried rice, which would either be incredible or a total disaster.  And if it’s a disaster, we could get takeout.  What do you think?_

What an asshole.  Well over a year now, and he was still making Ed grin at his phone like some kind of soppy kid.

 _i think you’re a godsend,_ Ed wrote back.   _or you would be if i was less aggressively agnostic but you get the point.  i’m probably going to be kind of late though so i dunno if you want to just eat without me and then as long as you don’t eat it ALL we can nuke some whenever i get there_

The instant he looked up from the phone screen to the laptop one, there was an email from a student begging for alternate office hours to talk about the midterm.  Which he needed to write, come to think of it.  Well, that pretty much guaranteed what he’d just said to Roy.

 _I’m betting I’ll be late, too,_ Roy had written back before Ed had had time to formulate even a brain-level response for the student.   _Just let me know when you leave, and don’t work hard enough to kill your appetite. <3_

As if that was even possible.

Ed promised that he would do both, and then he buried himself in the un-glamorous minutiae of this whole dream-job gig again.  No rest for the wicked, the moderately wicked, the well-intentioned but physically- and emotionally-clumsy, or… much of anyone, really.

Oh, well.

  


* * *

  


Steak fried rice was a flawless fucking victory worthy of a master-level Mortal Kombat game.

Not that Ed would know, since he and Al had, officially at least, Not Been Allowed to go down the street, carrying a bucket each to turn over so that they could stand on top and reach the controls at the single arcade game console in the corner store.

Roy pulled out a sheaf of papers the instant they finished eating, though—which wasn’t until something like eight fucking thirty, since Ed had straggled in only minutes after Roy had begun rummaging through the fridge and hurling ingredients together with a truly dashing sort of reckless culinary abandon.

Ed had snatched the dishes away to do them, which was why the bastard got away with the extra work thing; he had secreted his briefcase over to the couch and was sifting through pages by the time Ed made it into the living room to join him.

“Are you at least getting close?” Ed asked.  Two could play at the workaholic game, so he opened up his laptop.

Roy rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles, which made him look very young and very cute and more than slightly exhausted.  “With any luck, this is the homestretch.  The trial is due to start the Friday after next—which is a stupid day for it; once we select the jury, we’ll be guaranteed to carry over into the following week, so it gets to ruin an extra weekend.”

“It can try,” Ed said.  “But we can make it good anyway, if we really go for it.”

Roy smiled at him—a soft little tired smile, too weary to be guarded or clever or suave.

“You always do,” he said.  “Somehow.”

Ed attempted to grin back.  “Do what?  Really go for it, assuming that ‘it’ means ‘everything’; or make shit good by force?”

“Both,” Roy said.

Ed squirmed and shifted and twisted around until he’d managed to wedge himself into the admittedly somewhat insubstantial space between Roy’s thigh and the back of the couch.  It was a little too cramped to be, strictly speaking, more comfortable there, but it was sure as hell warmer, and it was _surer_ than hell where he wanted to be.

“You want to make a deal?” he asked.  “How about for every… I dunno, paragraph or statement or set of witness questions that you write, I’ll blow you once?”

Roy stared at him.

Ed shouldn’t have said that.

Even as settled as they were; even as safe as it always was; even as much as he trusted that man to the ends of the fucking Earth, with all of the secrets and the shames and the deepest, darkest cracks in his battered psyche—

That was a little too much.  It was a little too cheap—a little too saucy, a little too provocative, a little—

Papers fluttered to the carpet, and his laptop somehow got pried out of his hands and laid on the coffee table in the time it took him to blink, and then Roy was tackling him—gently—to the couch cushion and kissing all over his face.

“Hey!” he said.  “I—” It tickled something fucking awful, actually, but somehow he couldn’t quite bring himself to say _Stop_.  He knew Roy would, if he said it.  He knew Roy would listen.  “What are you, a dog?”

“For you,” Roy said, pausing long enough in the overzealous smooching to lean his forehead against Ed’s and let his eyes slide halfway shut, “I would be anything.”

Ed swallowed.  Then he swallowed again.  There were a lot of things he shouldn’t say; a lot of things he didn’t even know how to fit into the vaguest shape of a sentence.  A lot of things speech couldn’t carry even if he’d tried.

“How about a pastry chef?” he asked instead, though he did find himself physically incapable of resisting the urge to ruffle at one of the disheveled parts of Roy’s hair.  The fluffiness was irresistible when it was this close to your face.  “You could quit your job and make desserts for me all day.  How does that sound?”

“Delicious,” Roy said, leaning in to nose at Ed’s neck.  He was bordering more on cat than dog at this point, but Ed wasn’t about to complain.  “Pun entirely intended.  We could move to Paris.  Open a patisserie.  Ah, _c’est un rêve trop doux_.  Can’t think about that now.”

“I have no idea what you just said,” Ed said.

“Sorry,” Roy said, grinning against his neck in a way that did not feel apologetic in the least.  “ _Tu es si mignon quand tu me regards comme ça, mon petit choux_.”

“Hey,” Ed said.  “That word I know.”

“ _Petit_?” Roy asked, like he hadn’t fucking deliberately dropped that into a sentence just to drive Ed up the not-so-petit fucking wall.  “It’s just part of the phrase, I assure you.”

“What’s the phrase?” Ed asked.

“Never mind,” Roy said.

Ed ruffled at his hair again.  Much more vigorously.  With both hands this time.  “ _I_ mind.”

Roy’s face scrunched up in a way that was so cute that Ed’s heart yearned to forgive him for whatever horrible shit he’d just tried to get away with by saying it in French.  “Have mercy,” the bastard managed through the scrunching.  “I don’t want to die.”

“That’s not making me very optimistic about what shit you’re calling me in languages I can’t understand,” Ed said.

A few of the muscles in Roy’s back shifting subtly underneath the progressively more wrinkled lines of today’s nice shirt was Ed’s only warning before Roy’s weight surged up over him, pressing him down on the couch in earnest this time.  One of Roy’s hands tangled into his hair, tightening close to the scalp and tugging _just_ hard enough that it made Ed’s skin tingle like he’d jammed his finger into a wired socket—just hard enough to tilt his head back and expose his throat—

And then Roy’s teeth danced up the ridges of his esophagus so lightly that he almost forgot to think of the incisors.

“I can translate,” Roy murmured, breath hot, voice hotter; “into one that I know you recognize.”

“Holy crap, Roy,” Ed said—monosyllables were possible to slide past the heat blooming underneath his skin, which was halting the progress of air from his lungs in quantities sufficient to support any longer words.  “Do you—you don’t—”

Roy’s breath was only getting hotter, ghosting up along the underside of Ed’s chin, and then his mouth chased it, and Ed could feel the curve of the wicked fucking grin.  “I don’t what?”

“Don’t—” Ed had to grit his teeth and focus intently on the spelling of what he wanted to say.  His skin throbbed; his guts pulsed; his blood sung fucking arias as it raced through his veins like so much fucking starlight— “Don’t even—I mean, you _do_ know how hot you are, but you don’t—you don’t know how fucking _impossible_ it is—”

Roy laughed, low and rich and fucking volcanic, because he was an asshole, and he knew it, and he knew that Ed knew and couldn’t resist him anyway.

“Ah, _mais tu me possèdes toujours_ ,” Roy purred against his jawline, mouthing his way upward along it to nip at Ed’s ear.  Ed’s half-stifled gasp roused another laugh out of him, directly from the center of his chest, and it rumbled through the both of them—

There was a buzzing.

Ed blinked.  There was a lot of Roy-hair-fluff in his face.  He really wanted to pay attention to that, but there was an urgent sort of significance to the sound—a visceral _oh shit, gotta get that_ reaction that made his arm jerk with the impulse to reach for the phone.

But—who the hell’s phone was—?

He blinked a little more, then looked over towards the coffee table.

Turned out it was _both_ of their phones, and they were both sitting up, and—

Ed’s screen had displayed the little bar showing the first half of a text message, but Roy’s was ringing.  The number listed didn’t have a name associated with it, but by the way Roy’s face went flat and blank and then started to tighten up one line at a time—

Ed had an idea who it might be.

Roy ducked back in just long enough to brush a kiss against Ed’s cheek and then slipped off of the couch, getting to his feet and catching the phone up off of the tabletop in a single motion.  He stood—too… something.  Not too _tall_ , exactly, although he was definitely that sometimes, but too… rigid.  Too sharp; too straight; too official.  He had his shoulders squared and his heels together, and his eyes had gone so dark that they could have swallowed worlds.

“Roy Mustang,” he said into the phone, and his voice was still as smooth and as deep as ever, but—

 _Too_ smooth.  Too fucking clean; too fucking orchestrated.

Half of what he’d just said to introduce himself was true—but about fifteen seconds ago, when he saw that call flash across his phone screen, he’d stopped being _Roy_.

This was Mustang.  This was the part of him that had been a soldier—the part of him that had never stopped.

Roy’s eyes tracked across the wall opposite as he listened to what sounded like some indistinct humming from the distance at which Ed was sitting.

“Yes,” Roy said.  Clipped—his voice sounded clipped.  It sounded rehearsed, restricted, and slightly cold.  “I have it all at the offi—yes.  Of course.”  He’d raised the phone in his right hand; his left arm folded itself up behind him, curled fist settling against the small of his back.  Ed half expected him to drop the phone and snap off a salute.  “No, it shouldn’t take more than… That’s right.  Yes.”  A very narrow smile turned up just the corners of his mouth.  “I don’t think you need to worry about that.  We’ll handle it.”  His breathing had changed—the cadence of it, the length of the inhalations; now they were quick and short and desperate, like he didn’t know how many more chances he was liable to get.  “Absolutely.  No, no—that’s really only for the paralegal’s time; it doesn’t… yes.  First thing tomorrow.  Thank you.  Have a good night, General… I will.  Thank you.  Goodbye.”

Roy’s hand lowered the phone, and his thumb tapped the red button to conclude the call, but the rest of him didn’t seem to be there.

The rest of him was… well, hell.  Ed didn’t know.  He just knew that it scared him fucking shitless watching the perfectly postured husk that remained of Roy gently putting the phone down on the table and then straightening again.

Ed was good with scared, though, mostly.  Scared made him stupid, sometimes; but sometimes it made him brave.

He swung his legs over the side of the couch, stood up, stepped forward, and carefully reached a hand out to touch Roy’s arm.

Roy flinched—hard, like he’d been struck, like he’d been cut, like he’d been _burned_ —

Ed recoiled so fast he almost wasn’t sure he’d ever moved.

Roy turned, fully this time, focusing on Ed now—and the warmth seeped back into his face, and the muscles in it started to move again, and he mustered a shaky little smile with more than a touch of pain underneath, and that hurt a hundred times worse than the fact that he’d startled away on instinct.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  He was him again—he was Roy again; he wasn’t _Mustang_ ; he wasn’t some lawyer to dubious fucking unknown-quantity generals with skeletons pouring out of their closets every time you nudged the door.  He lifted one hand, started to extend it, hesitated— “God, Ed, I—I’m sorry, I—”

“No,” Ed said, and maybe his voice wasn’t a whole lot stabler than a mid-nineties Soviet regime, but so what?  “ _I’m_ fucking sorry.  I didn’t—I should’ve—”

He should have known better.  He should have known; he should have made the connection.  He should have remembered that when the trauma came alive in Roy’s head, it was resurrected in his body, too.  He should have remembered that touching him at those times only ever served to jerk him out of the past before he was ready.  He should have remembered that trying to offer comfort the easy way would only make it worse.

“I shouldn’t’ve interrupted,” he forced out.  “It’s not like it’s my first fuckin’ rodeo, and you even said—you _told_ me it’s like that, and—”

“Oh, my God,” Roy said, and it was barely any louder than a whisper, but the words fell like individual anvils into Ed’s chest, and they dragged him; he _sunk_ — “No, no—shit.  Come here, I—please?”

And his arms were open, and Ed steered his body’s momentum and fell right into them.

“Fuck,” he said into Roy’s collarbone.  “I didn’t… I just made this about me.”

“No,” Roy said—into Ed’s hair, so at least that was fair turnabout.  “You just stopped it from being about _me_ and made it about both of us again.  And that’s what I want.  That’s the whole point.”  He leaned his head on Ed’s and drew a breath—fuller this time, deeper; his heartbeat thudded soft and steady where Ed had his ear pressed in close.  “I don’t think I could do this alone.  But with you behind me, sometimes I think I could conquer the world—and for the first time in a very long time, I know that I can make it through just about anything the universe sees fit to throw into my face.”

Ed might possibly have held on a little tighter.

“Behind you’s one of my favorite places,” he said.  “Best spot for lookin’ at your ass.”

Roy kissed the top of his head, which should have been obnoxious and offensive and a lot of other things that it definitely wasn’t.  “I hope it goes without saying that I feel precisely the same way about you.”

Ed nudged his head under Roy’s chin.  It felt good there.  It felt like it fit.  It felt safe.  “Someday I wanna pit your libido and your inner romantic against each other in a fight to the death and see who wins.”

“They’re both gentlemen underneath it all,” Roy said, arms curling just a little tighter around him.  “They’d talk it out and come to a compromise.  Ideally a compromise that involved you in a bed with your hair down, lit only by a few of those candles.”

“If you’re real good,” Ed said, “that can be arranged.”

There was an edge on Roy’s soft laugh that gave Ed the best kind of fucking goosebumps.  “Is that part of the—ah—reward package for my weekend?”

“Can be,” Ed said, drawing back enough to eye him.  “Or you could have it right now.  Y’know.  Tide you over until then.”

Roy was looking at him like he was the savior of the fucking universe.

He wasn’t.  And he wouldn’t be.  Nobody would; not really—which was fine by the universe, because it was just going to keep on chewing up atoms and spitting them back out in different configurations no matter what anybody did.

But maybe—maybe just this once; maybe if he was careful; maybe if he tried hard enough and walked the tightrope _just_ right—

Maybe he could save Roy Mustang.

And that’d be enough.

  


* * *

  


He’d completely forgotten about the text that had made its way to his phone at the same second that Bradley had called Roy.  He only rediscovered it when he went to shove his phone into his pocket so that they could make their merry way upstairs and fulfill a few more of Roy’s gooey little fantasies, using those last few moments before the day’s exhaustion caught up once and for all, and they both passed out and started drooling on their pillows.

The good news was that it was from Al.

The bad news was that it said _Would you like your body of evidence emailed or printed or on a flash drive or all three?_

Naturally, the mere implication of that sentence—well-intentioned as it undeniably was—made Ed’s guts wind up around each other until he’d probably have better luck untangling a pile of Christmas lights.

Couldn’t he have tonight?  Couldn’t he have half an hour to indulge his sappy-ass boyfriend with some stupid little clichés?  Couldn’t he go for five minutes without having to remember that Soph Kimblee intended to cast a shadow over everything he had _ever_ wanted for himself?

He sent back _whatever’s easiest for you, thank you, you’re the best_ and then shut off the screen and put the phone facedown on the nightstand and worked— _strived_ —to forget about it long enough for his stomach to unknot.

He tried not to let it weigh on him as they were brushing their teeth and all that shit, but the second he turned his back—or, more specifically, started to drag his shirt off over his head and was momentarily incapacitated and functionally blind—Roy pounced with the gentle hands and the gentle voice and the gentle “Everything all right?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  This conversation would have benefited from the dignity of him not standing there in his jeans with his shirt balled up in both hands, but that could probably be said for most conversations he’d had this way.  The upshot was that the soft-warm presence of Roy’s palms on his shoulders was all the more fucking glorious when there wasn’t fabric in the way.  “Just… I feel like I’ve spent so much of my life waiting for parts of it to be over.  Not—you—obviously; that’s—the opposite, but—”

Here he fucking went again.

“It’s not you,” he said, feeling like he was floundering—feeling like the tide had come in while he was looking the other way, and he’d thought he was smelling the salt at a distance right up until it rose to his fucking nose.  “It’s—and I mean—I like my work.  I really do; I’m doing—it’s what I always wanted.  Or—it’s still what I want, even if it’s not what I thought I wanted, or what I thought it’d be, exactly, or—”

“I know,” Roy said softly, thumbs stroking back along both sides of Ed’s jaw.  His smile was small and delicate, and there was a terrible well behind his eyes—cold stone and crumbling mortar; the water was very far away.  “God, I know.  And I’m with you.  I know you know that.  But I also know that understanding it and be able to rely on it when your heart hits the floor and you need something to lift it are two different things.”

“My heart fucking likes the floor,” Ed said—he had to look at the carpet to say it, but he did get it out.  “Can’t fucking figure out why, but…”

Roy brushed both hands down the sides of his neck and then leaned in to kiss his forehead.  “Sometimes gravity doesn’t make quite as much sense in life as it does on paper.”

Ed took a deep breath and then reached out to start undoing the buttons on Roy’s shirt.  “Got no fucking problem with the universe on paper.  The theory makes sense.  It’s the day-to-day stuff that’s hard.”

“You,” Roy said, shrugging his way out of the shirt more sensuously than anybody had any fucking right to be, “are a marvel.”

“Not a DC?” Ed asked.

“I deserved that,” Roy said.

“I’ll show you what you fuckin’ deserve,” Ed said, scrounging up a grin, then planting both hands on Roy’s bare chest and pushing him backwards towards the bed.  “Fucking candles and…”

Roy laughed—and then Roy batted his hands away, darted in, hooked both arms around his waist, hiked him up—

“ _Roy_!” he managed.

That was all he got out before the bastard—who was still laughing—tossed him onto the bed, and he hit the mattress, bounced, rolled, came up snarling—

Roy had already bounded after him, was already leaning in to smother his scowl with a kiss, reaching around to catch a finger in the elastic tie holding up his ponytail to drag it out slowly—and even Ed had to admit that there was something half-sexy and half-soothing about the way his hair cascaded down around his shoulders, slithering against his neck, bathing Roy’s hands.  It probably didn’t look like all that much, since bits of it were tangled and crimped from being tied up all day, but—

But when he drew back out of the kiss and opened his eyes, Roy looked like he’d won a record-breaking lottery, and they’d paid him in bars of gold and piles of gemstones beautifully cut.

“Hey,” Ed said.  “We lugged those candles all the way up here.  You gonna light ’em, or what?”

“Ah,” Roy breathed, eyes slipping partway shut, and that half-lidded look was wholly too hot.  “Thank you for reminding me.”

They’d set half a dozen of the candles Ed had bought the other night on individual saucer plates that they’d dug up in one of the cupboards, which Roy had no recollection of ever buying—despite their mysterious origin, that made them perfect for protecting the furniture from potential drips of wax, since no one had any sentimental attachment to them.  Roy was rummaging in the drawer in the nightstand on his side of the bed; upon a few moments’ excavation, he came up with a little green Bic lighter and a triumphant expression.  The truly unfortunate part was how fucking good smugness always looked on him; it left Ed with just enough presence of mind to recognize that he should have disliked that on principle, but on Roy it was dizzyingly hot every last damn time.

He supposed that—to his own credit—part of what made it hot was the inherent harmlessness of it.  Roy had mastered the art of the self-satisfied smirk and the cocky swagger, yes—but it never ran any deeper than the top layer of the image he wanted to present.  He was never condescending.  He never rubbed it in.  He was never a fucking dick about it.  And now, a year and a bit into close quarters with the true depth of his personality and his _life_ , Ed knew just how flimsy the façade really was.  The smirk would never be threatening to anyone who realized that Roy was a disgustingly sweet, fluffy, gushingly devoted teddy bear underneath.

The teddy bear in question was currently applying the little plume of the lighter’s flame to every wick that he could reach, so Ed wriggled his way under the covers and tried to finger-comb his hair outward so that it would spill all over the pillow.

When Roy turned around from communing with the candles, his breath caught, and his eyes widened, and he went very, very still, so Ed was going to count that as a win.

“Is this kinda what you wanted?” Ed asked—y’know, just in case.

“This,” Roy said, tossing the lighter down and scrambling a little to settle in next to Ed, twining both arms around him and immediately burying one hand in the flood of Ed’s hair, “is _exactly_ what I want.”

Ed tried not to secretly enjoy the schmoopy nuzzle thing Roy was doing, but the faint tickle of it against his neck made such an amazing contrast with the sensation of Roy’s fingers tugging through his hair that it was impossible to fight.

“Man,” Ed said.  “You’re easy.”

The other advantage of the schmoop-nuzzle was that Ed could instantly feel Roy’s grin.  “Only for you, my dear.”

“Gross,” Ed said.

“I try,” Roy said, not even pretending to stifle his delight.

  


* * *

  


His heart starts to bang like a bass drum with about half an hour left in the _air_ , which is incredibly fucking useless.  He’s so wound up that his head is swimming by the time they actually land; and then he has to drag his sorry ass through customs and get his passport stamped before he’s even reemerged into the airport proper.  And where the fuck is the baggage claim?  There are just stupid, shitty arrows pointing everywhere; and he’s so dehydrated that it feels like his skin is made of used chewing gum even though he kept trying to chug water whenever he was awake; and the plane was stuffily hot and desiccatingly cold at intervals; and the food was bad; and if he loses himself in airport purgatory and never finds his luggage, he is going to be so _pissed_ —

As he staggers out past the security line, motion draws his eye, and he glances instinctively over towards the cluster of people waiting just beyond the checkpoint entrance, and—

It’s—

Roy.

Oh, God.  Oh, _God_ , after all of this—after all of it; after a week and then some of fumbling his way through the strangling minutiae of adulthood on his own—after a week and then some of immense emotional ricochets without any of the safety nets he can usually rely on—after a week and then some which tied itself up with a long stretch of stressful travel and having to face this unimaginable facet of Roy’s being in the midst of everything else—

Half of Ed wants to flat-out sprint towards Roy and fling himself into the bastard’s arms so hard they both topple down onto the carpet, and somebody ends up with a concussion.

The other half of him is choking down fucking terror—because it’s not the _same_ anymore, is it?  It can’t be; it can’t _ever_ be; everything is different now; everything is slanted sideways and slipping.  It’s not that he doesn’t know Roy anymore—that’s melodramatic as hell, for one thing; it’s untrue, for another.  He still knows Roy.  He just knows more now.  He knows things he can’t help wishing that he didn’t.

The indecision almost trips him, which is a fucking laugh: he actually stumbles, like he hasn’t had enough bullshit from his body today with the cramped plane seats and the hefting of baggage into overhead bins, which set his shoulder off like a goddamn firework.

And he sees Roy’s arms shift in that same instant—in the instant that Ed’s balance fails, and there’s a distinct possibility that Nobel Prizewinner Edward Elric is about to faceplant on the floor at a major airport in the nation’s capital.  Roy’s arms shift, and his hands twitch, like he’s reaching for Ed on instinct even though he’s far too many steps away to do anything in time.

Roy’s eyes are so fucking tired, and his face is so fucking tight, and in the moment that Ed might fall, there’s a flash of unguarded emotion across it—a forked-lightning flicker of fear and misery and loneliness and something that looks an awful lot like devastation.

Ed can’t do it.

Maybe that makes him fucking weak, but he just can’t let Roy try to do this alone.

Not after everything they’ve done, everything they’ve been, everything they’ve been _through_ —

Ed has loved him too much since the very beginning.  He couldn’t have hoped to fight it then.  By now—

By now there’s pretty much nothing in the world he wants more than to fold himself in against Roy’s chest and just fucking hold on tight.

So the second he catches his balance, that’s what he does.

Roy’s arms wrap around him, and one hand buries itself in his hair, and all five fingers clench, and Roy presses his face against the top of Ed’s head and lets out a shaky breath.  There’s still a strip of gauze taped to his face, although he’s managed to downsize it enough that it’s almost subtle except for the way it catches against Ed’s hair.

“Hey,” Ed says, and if it comes out sounding sort of reedy… well.  Too fucking bad.  “Missed you.”

“God, Ed,” Roy breathes.  “I missed you, too.”

Ed can’t seem to convince his hands to let go of Roy’s jacket, but he manages to draw back enough to look up.  “You—I mean, I guess… I guess ‘Are you okay’ is a stupid question, but—are you surviving, or do you need ice cream?”

Roy smiles at him.  Even wrecked, even weary—Jesus _Christ_ , he is a fucking looker.  He’s also disentangling his fingers from Ed’s ponytail so that he can stroke Ed’s bangs back instead.

“I’ve got everything I need,” he says.

“Oh, _barf_ ,” Ed says.

Roy kisses his forehead.  “Barf indeed.”

After some discussion conducted during the course of a brief, clumsy promenade towards the elusive baggage claim without ever letting go of each other’s hair and/or clothing, it is determined that neither of them especially wants ice cream, but that both of them desperately want food.  Despite some cautious needling, Ed is unable to determine why Roy hasn’t fed himself yet despite the fact that it’s eight o’clock at night, and he’s had a hell of a fucking day—Ed suspects, of course, that it has quite a lot to do with the hell of a fucking day; and with subtle forms of self-punishment, but Roy’s too smart to give him anything concrete to go on.

That’s lawyers for you.

“I rented a car,” Roy says as they approach the exit at long fucking last.  Ed finally gave up the fake-fight before it turned into a real-fight on accident, which means that Roy is dragging his stupid suitcase, although at least he retained possession of his backpack.  “I figured you would probably have had about enough of subways by now.”

Is Roy being thoughtful because he’s just _like_ that, or because he’s trying to make up for something?  Because he’s trying to make up for _all_ of it?

Fuck.  That thought is so uncharitable and so _unfair_ that Ed’s empty stomach turns and tries to empty itself, avidly enough that he tastes bile in the back of his throat.

“Thanks,” he says, trying to make it sound really fucking grateful.  And he _is_.  He is grateful.  He’s grateful as all fucking get-out.  It’s just that he’s a shit-ton of other things too, and it’s all getting tangled, and he can’t figure out what should be on top.  “Maybe we should figure out what kind of food they’ve got right around your hotel before we leave the wifi.  Could call ’em and shit.  Takeout’d probably be ready by the time we get there.”

“Brilliant,” Roy says, drawing Ed’s remarkably ornery suitcase to an unreasonably graceful stop.  “I saw an Indian place just on the next corner.  It smelled awfully good, if that’s a recommendation.”

“Where are you staying?” Ed asks, attempting to coax his phone onto the wifi instead of roaming minutes, since racking up any more of the latter will result in him wanting to firebomb the service company’s headquarters even more than usual.  “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

In the end, what they’ve got is an immense quantity of decent curry, a king-sized bed, and—at long fucking last—something like solitude, and quiet, and _each other_.

Hard to knock it.

The only real downside is that Ed can’t collapse on the cushy comforter—they are shelling out like _hell_ for this trial, apparently; is this his tax dollars at work?—and stuff his face with curry-soaked basmati rice at the same time, so he’s sort of trying to alternate.  Evidently, Roy’s almost as close to the brink of starvation as he is, since they’re just scarfing in silence for a couple of minutes before either of them really seems to catch their breath.

Ed sees Roy hesitate first, like his brain’s coming back into play now that the hunger isn’t overwhelming, but then… nothing.  Nothing gets said.

“Hey,” Ed says.  Roy glances at him too-fast.  On instinct Ed looks down and mops at some stray curry with a piece of really pretty excellent naan before he looks up again.  “How’d it go today?”

The thin smile speaks a thousand words, and then Roy speaks a couple more.

“They haven’t called me just yet,” he says.  “They thought they were going to need me today, but the examination of the previous witness went on for two and a half hours, and the cross-examination was another hour and a half.  I don’t know how he held up to it, to be honest with you.  I think my situation is a little more cut and dry, but…” He shrugs, twirling his plastic fork among the beautiful curry dregs lining one of the styrofoam containers.  “Olivier Armstrong is famous for a reason.  She’s ruthless, and when she knows she’s right, she’s unstoppable.  I’ve always suspected she doesn’t sleep.”  He draws a breath and lets it out slowly.  “This… is going to be the fight of Bradley’s life.”

Ed bolts down the last of the naan and barely tastes it, which is a crime in its own right—just on such a dramatically different scale that it barely even registers tonight.

“Do you know what you’re in for?” Ed asks.  He’s not sure he wants to know the answer, but he has some kind of a sixth sense that the question itself is important, and he gets those quasi-premonitions rarely enough that he trusts them when they come.

“Mostly,” Roy says, and his voice hits a soft-thoughtful tone Ed recognizes, but his eyes are very, very far away.  “She prepped me over the phone before I left, so I know what she’ll be asking.  It’s Bradley’s lawyers I have to worry about.  And the aftermath, of course, should it add up to anything.”

Ed nudges the containers aside so that he can reach out and put his hand on Roy’s knee without as much of a risk of knocking curry all over these clean white sheets.

“Can I take the pun as a good sign?” he asks.

Roy spreads his hand over Ed’s and musters a hint of the rakish grin.

“You can take anything you like,” he says.

“Cool,” Ed says, twisting his wrist enough to grasp Roy’s hand in his.  “I’ll take this.”  When Roy starts laughing—low and a little hollowly, but it counts—he tugs at it.  “No, I’m serious,” he says.  “S’mine now.  You can borrow it on a temporary basis when you need it, but I own it, so you’d better bring it back.”

“I do not,” Roy says, squeezing gently, “and cannot understand how I ever made it through a day before I knew you.”

“Gross,” Ed says, but he grips a little tighter.

Roy smiles at him, brighter this time.  “Glad you noticed.  I do my best.”

Ed starts shoving containers out of the way and hauling on his arm in earnest.  “C’mere and do your best where I can leach your warmth, then.”

“In the spirit of gratitude,” Roy says, shifting across the bed towards him, “I’m going to pretend that wasn’t a cleverly-worded request for cuddles.”

“I’ll die first,” Ed says, nestling in.

“Clearly,” Roy says, stroking at his hair.

Ed basks in it for a long, long second before he cracks an eye open and considers the ravaged remains of their dinner.

“We should move that,” he says.

Roy kisses his temple.  “It’s probably not the worst thing the maids here have found in the sheets, but… we really should.”

“Fuck this grownup shit,” Ed says, levering himself up to start collecting pieces.

Roy moves to help him.  “Aptly put.”

Roy doesn’t even want to watch crap TV while they lie around and wait for Ed’s internal clock to realize firstly that it’s dark outside; and secondly that his body’s on the verge of collapse.

It’s probably a good thing, though; Ed’s pretty sure that commercials would short-circuit the last two or three working neurons in his brain with all of the obnoxiously loud jingles and the flashing colors and the bubble letters and the _demands_.

Plus it sort of forces his hand.  With no distractions available, his list of excuses just halved, and then halved again.  The thing’s like unstable uranium right now.

When Roy says “So, the million-dollar prize-money question—how was your trip?”, the last feeble little fragment of resistance fails.

“It was good,” Ed says.  “Kinda exhausting in a lot of parts, but—worth it.  It was important.  I can show you the pictures later if you want.  With running commentary if you’re feeling masochistic.”

“I would love that,” Roy says.

Ed makes a very gentle elbowing-ish movement in the area of Roy’s ribs.  Not hard enough to budge the arm that’s draped around his shoulders, or cause any damage, or do much of anything, but… gestures matter.  “I figured you would.”  He takes a deep breath, and then he clears his throat.  “Meanwhile, though, how ’bout… how ’bout you tell me a little bit about yourself?”

“Ah,” Roy says, voice light.  He doesn’t shift; he doesn’t flinch; his arm doesn’t tighten.  He’s so damn good.  Nobody could pin a single damn thing on him in a courtroom if he didn’t want them to.  Nobody could convict him with incontrovertible evidence, because he’s dangerously smart, and even more dangerously talented at hiding it.  “Well—my name is Roy Mustang; I’m thirty-nine years old, and will be for the foreseeable future; I like long walks on the beach and sappy candles and cheesy old sci-fi, although I’m delighted to report that none of that is especially relevant, because I’m currently employed as the love slave of a truly wonderf—”

“Roy,” Ed says.  The syllable sticks on its way up—scraping tracks on the inside of his esophagus, and the stinging doesn’t seem to want to stop.

The silence stretches a little too long, and Ed’s heart starts to fill it, thumping faster by the second as he tries to weigh his options on a reasonable scale.  He gets stupid when he feels like this.  He gets stupid, and irrational, and he forgets how to think like the kind of person he admires; he forgets everything except how to salve the wound to try to fix everything so that the shitty, uncomfortable currents in the air will just _go away_ , and maybe his dumbass fucking body will calm the fuck down—

“I was going to ask if it can wait,” Roy says quietly.  “But I don’t… I don’t suppose it can.  Or I don’t suppose it _should_ ; ‘can’ is a bit deceitful.”

“I’m sorry,” Ed gets out, and that’s worse than the name was a minute ago; that’s shards of glass and broken stones— “I just—”

“No,” Roy says, leaning in against him, and one hand rises to draw a few fingers through his hair.  “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry that—I’m sorry for all of it, really.  A person as exceptional as you shouldn’t have to deal with all of this sordid business in the first place, and you certainly shouldn’t have to drag yourself out here after a very long trip just to put up with more of my bullshit than ever.”

“I don’t mind,” Ed says, which isn’t… _strictly_ true, but the sentiment is right.  “I don’t care about that, and I don’t… I mean, I just—”

Shit.

He takes a new breath, holds it, lets it out, and swallows.  There’s still a whole host of jagged rubble in his throat.

“I just want to feel like I know you again,” he says.  “I just—”

“You want to be able to trust me,” Roy says softly.

Ed lies very, very fucking still.  Is there any chance this will un-happen?  Any chance at all?

“Christ, Ed,” Roy says, still with only the gentlest, lowest, kindest register of his voice, and somehow that almost makes it worse.  “I don’t _blame_ you.  I wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good to me about this as you’ve been.  I—hurt you.  Hid things.  And it wasn’t… I wasn’t ever trying to destabilize the foundations of what we have—I hope you know that; I hope that if nothing else… But it gets so _easy_ after a while to just—keep sweeping it under the rug.  Keep putting it off for one more day, and one more, and then you wake up five years later, and…”

“It’s not too late,” Ed says.  Shitfuck _damn_ , that came out— “I mean—if that’s what you were going to say.  Or what you were thinking about, or—something.”  He can’t cram the words back into his mouth, so he’s just going to have to keep moving, like they’re not hanging over the bed like a filthy miasma to remind them both of just how fucking lousy Ed’s person-brain can be.  He tries to curl small enough that less of Roy’s arm will touch him, but it doesn’t feel like it’s working.  “I just meant—I mean, I understand.  Not what you went through, or anything; I don’t think fucking anybody who hasn’t been there can understand that.  But I understand about getting burned a couple of times and getting into the habit of withholding stuff, and I know how it… how you think you’re just packing a little bit of snow, and the next thing you know, you’ve got an avalanche.”

Roy foils Ed’s quasi-escape plan instantly by leaning in just a fraction closer, tightening his arm around Ed’s shoulders slightly.  “That is… unfortunately, very true.”

“I just meant—” Ed tries to breathe slow and think clearly.  Fucking figures that the jet-lag chooses _now_ to catch up—it couldn’t have clubbed him in the back of his head and rubbed his face in the disoriented haze while he was stuck on a shitty plane for eight hours; oh, _no_.  It had to wait until he was trying to have a critically serious conversation, didn’t it?  “I don’t… I understand… why you did… that.  Why you handled it that way.  And that’s—I mean, I guess it’s stupid to say I’m ‘okay’ with it, ’cause—shit, I dunno.  But I can take that part.  That’s fine.  Just—” He has to force himself to swallow again in a vain effort to bring some moisture back into his mouth.  He’s staring at the blank TV screen, and his heart’s just getting louder and louder and louder the longer that he waits.  “Just so long as… it… changes.  From here.  So long as you start letting me in.”

This time, Roy does shift away from him—not violently, and not all that fast, but Ed’s blood fucking _curdles_ all the same; what if that’s too close to Ed calling the shots on somebody else’s life, here, and Roy’s about to get out of this fucking bed and walk out that door and just never fucking come back?

This isn’t—

Of course it’s fair.  If anything’s fair, this is; Ed’s had more than his share of good luck, and the scales ought to settle up.

But it’s _wrong_.  It’s wrong in his guts and his veins and every single shuddering nerve, because this is a throwback like he shouldn’t be able to get this side of a time machine.

He feels so fucking young.  Young and frail and unsteady.  Like he used to, so much more often, when this was new, and he wasn’t sure of it, and he couldn’t lean on it, and he didn’t _believe_ in it, and—

And he knows exactly why that’s gone.  But it’s fucking terrifying to have fallen directly into that same old fucking pit without a chance to scream.

“Ed,” Roy says, voice still too goddamn sweet.  His hands lift; his palms settle against Ed’s cheeks; he leans their foreheads together and looks up at Ed through his eyelashes, like this is some kind of seduction scene.

Or a confession.  Maybe that.

“I can’t promise I’m going to be good at this,” Roy says.  “It’s a lot.  There is a _lot_ , and it’s been buried a long time.  That’s for my protection and yours.  It’s… it was never… it started less as a coping mechanism than as… the only way that I could think of to survive.  Just—it’s going to be uphill, all the way.  And I want to.  Don’t get me wrong, love; I _want_ to; I want—I want you to—I want this to be safe, for you.  I don’t want you to feel like you have to go around with a flashlight, kicking doors in, and the music’s going to crescendo, and then there’s a jump-scare.”

Ed tries to smile, abjectly fucking fails, and wrinkles his nose as a replacement.  “That’s not the most comforting metaphor you’ve ever stretched to its limits, there, y’know.”

Roy kisses the tip of his nose.  “Sorry.”  The slow exhale that follows makes Ed’s hair flutter in a way that’s probably ‘adorable’, if you’re Roy, and ‘hilarious’ if you’re anybody else on the planet.  “I…” Roy says.  “Well… hell.  I don’t even know where to start.”

They’ve already brushed their teeth and all that shit; there are only two things standing between them and what Ed desperately hopes will be a long stretch of blissful, dreamless sleep: his own damn jet-lag, and this conversation.

“C’mere,” Ed says.  He hauls at the blankets, shimmy-shifts himself down under them, and motions for Roy to join him, then reaches up to turn out the light once they’re settled side-by-side.  It’s easier in the dark.  Most things are.  There’s a Creamsicle-colored halo around the edges of the curtains from the city lights, but it’s dim enough that Ed probably wouldn’t be much good at distinguishing Roy’s features if he wasn’t so familiar with them by now.  “Start at the beginning.  The _real_ beginning.  Tell me about your parents and shit.”

“‘And shit’ is about the extent of it,” Roy says.  He draws yet another deep breath and releases it—which is good, in a way.  At least Ed’s not the only one who feels like his whole body is a single fucking heartbeat; like his skin is boiling from underneath, and the only way he can think of to cool the bellows of his lungs is to slow their progress as much as possible.  “I… to go a long way back—my mother’s father’s family emigrated from Japan shortly before World War II.  They had some kind of a business on the coast somewhere; I think I was told what it was once, but I can’t remember.  Fishery, possibly.  But that could be too much Hemingway in high school talking.  In any case—it was an inopportune time to be Asian, to say the absolute least of a very long story.  My mother’s parents met in one of the internment camps.  After her family was finally released, they ended up in Fremont.  I believe her father had a cousin or a second-cousin there who hadn’t been rounded up; something like that—some sort of a family connection.  My mother was born there in 1959.  She and my father went to the same community college in the area, ended up in a few literature courses together, apparently, and… hit it off, I suppose.”

Ed is used to reading the invisible ink scrawled between the lines when it comes to talking about parents.  He and Al and Winry were all fucking masters of it by the age of twelve.

“What happened?” he asks.

“To my understanding,” Roy says, “my father transferred t—”

“To them,” Ed says.  “How old were you?”

Roy pauses.  “When they died?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.

“Ah,” Roy says.  He’s figuring out that Ed heard it without it being anywhere near explicitly said—and remembering why.  “Well, _I_ happened, or began to happen; and then they got married in a tearing hurry; and then my father lost his accounting job and enlisted in the military as an act of… something like desperation, I suppose.  And he was one of the proud and lucky few to be shipped out during the Lebanese Civil War.”

“Oh, God,” Ed says—for a lot of reasons; for so _many_ fucking reasons.  “He didn’t—come back, did he?”

“No,” Roy says.  “It’s not one of the military involvements anyone except historians talks much about, because it wasn’t very extensive, but… soldiers died, as so many soldiers do.  He was one of them.  Which left my mother in a bit of a spot, since people had a tendency not to believe her marriage certificate or her handful of photos or her brand-new last name.”

“Shit,” Ed says.

“Quite a lot of it,” Roy says.  “We moved to San Francisco to live with my father’s sister, who had a very un-child-proofed bar.  On the upside, people were significantly less outright racist there, if only because such a substantial portion of the population wasn’t white.”

Ed winces.  “Sounds… fun.”

“I don’t remember,” Roy says.  “Well—bits and pieces.  I remember that the first time we ever went down Lombard Street, it was in a taxi, because my mother couldn’t drive.  And my Aunt Chris was laughing at us the whole time and then apologizing to the taxi driver for the holes we were wearing in his armrests by clinging to them so hard.”

Ed works the spit around in his mouth for a second and then runs his hand down the front of the T-shirt Roy uses as pajamas, like it matters to smooth out the wrinkles when they’re one soul-searching discussion away from sleep.  “To be fair, that street’s like a fucking Escher nightmare grafted onto a real landscape.”

“True,” Roy says.

“Anyway,” Ed says.  “Your mom.”

“My mom,” Roy says, more softly.  “I remember… I remember her being remarkably beautiful—my aunt has a couple of photos to corroborate that.  She really, _really_ was.”

“Explains a lot,” Ed says, extending an elbow to nudge at him gently.

The faint light gleams off of a grin—but only for a moment before it’s gone.  “Well… in any case.  For a long time, she was putting in impossible hours, helping my aunt with the bar and working at a laundry service and bussing tables in between.”

“Jeez,” Ed says.  “So what—what happened?”  He swallows.  No way not to make it sound kind of shitty.  “To her, I mean?”

“She was tough,” Roy says.  “Esophageal cancer was tougher.”

Ed tries to see him properly in the dark, but… no dice.

“Shit,” he says.  “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Roy says.  “It was a long time ago.”

“Like hell does that make it all right,” Ed says.

The blanket rustles, and then Roy’s hand emerges from beneath it to stroke Ed’s hair back a bit.

“I suppose not,” Roy says.  “It… all happened very fast.  And then it was just me and my aunt Chris—I was seven.  She would let me sit behind the bar with her on a very tall stool and wipe glasses if I was careful, and I’d go around to all of the little bowls on the bar and on the tables and refill the peanuts when they ran out.  I was very good at that.  Most of her patrons were regular, and by and large they thought I was charming.”

“You are charming,” Ed says.

“You flatter me,” Roy says.

“Of course I do,” Ed says.  “You love it.”

“Guilty as charged,” Roy says.

There’s a pause.  Ed doesn’t know how to say the things he should, the things he… doesn’t _want_ to, exactly, but knows he has to, on some level.  Things like _That’s not enough_.  Things like _No, you can’t derail the topic with a little flirting and get out of this_.  There has to be a nicer way to put it, doesn’t there?  A way to put his foot down that’s still loving instead of just—harsh and authoritative and fucking _cold_?

“Anyway,” Roy says, softly.  He knows.  Of course he knows.  “That’s about all there is for that bit of it.  Chris and I got along much too well.  She and my mother had never precisely seen eye-to-eye, although they respected each other enormously.  She’s a great believer in family, although she extends that to the kind of family you build as well as the one you’re born with.  But she’s also a great believer in preserving family at all costs, which is… presumably why she stopped speaking to me for several years after I enlisted.”

“Oh,” Ed says, stupidly.  “Oh, _shit_.”

“It hurt,” Roy says.  He sounds almost… it’s not surprise, exactly—wonderment?  A tone two shades this side of disbelief, striped with something like curiosity.  “But even at the time, I understood it.  I was offering myself up willingly to the jaws of the creature that had devoured her only sibling; of _course_ she was mad.  I would have been furious.”

Silence again—but this time, Ed understands why.

“It’s… strange,” Roy says.  “I haven’t… I hadn’t even thought about that in so long that I’d forgotten some of the details, and now I keep remembering all these little things that had just… faded.”

Ed doesn’t know what to say.  He hates that, and hates himself for it, but there it fucking is.  He reaches out and wraps his hand around Roy’s, like maybe that will transmit some of it even if he can’t muster enough higher brain function for fucking speech.

Roy lifts their joined hands and kisses Ed’s knuckles.

Maybe it worked.

“I’ve spent so long,” Roy says, “trying to make myself believe that if I just… suppress and deny and try to force myself to forget everything that came before it, that… perhaps the war just won’t exist.”

“I wish it could,” Ed says before he can shut his mouth long enough to think it over, let alone stop himself.  “I fucking wish it could—I—I just want you to—”

“You’re home to me, Ed,” Roy says softly.  “The rest of it… the rest of it is just—noise.  And with you, I can bear it.”

“Jesus,” Ed says.  He hesitates, because people are difficult, weird, _hard_ ; he never knows whether his impulses will read right to anybody else; he never knows where boundaries are until he’s already tripped over them and introduced his face to the pavement—and then he runs his fingertips along Roy’s arm a little.  “You know you’re—you’re it, right?  You’re it.”

Roy leans in enough to press their foreheads together for a few seconds.  And neither of them has to say a damn thing, and Ed _loves_ that.  He loves how safe it feels; how comfortable; how real; how warm; how _good_ —

Roy draws back, and Ed draws a breath.  There’s one more thing he has to dig out of this mire before he can convince his brain to sleep.

“So,” he says.  “Where does Riza come in?  Always seems like she’s basically your sister or something.  I think you said… one time you said you were both in—both over there, right?”

“Just about,” Roy says.  “She came in, literally, to Chris’s place a few months after my mother died.  Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother had been dead for a while, and we just sort of… I think we both instantly sensed the kinship, and she was stuck there for hours at a time waiting for him, and we started doing our homework together.  She went to a different school, but we had a lot of the same coursework.  Chris would book taxis for Riza’s father so that they’d get home safe—and she told him why, in so many words; she saidto him ‘This isn’t for you; it’s for her.’  I think it was the best possible thing for both of us, really, because we’d both been… I mean, I had friends at school, to some extent, because that tends to happen when you have the same classmates every day, and you need someone to run around with at recess.  But you know how it is—how sometimes you connect with someone immediately on the simple basis of shared tragedy, I suppose.  How you can _feel_ it when you have something like that in common, and your entire life’s priorities are just so different as a result.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “That’s how I felt about Elicia the first time I met her.”

He can hear the ghost of a smile better than he can see it.  “I noticed that.  It was partly delightful, and partly terribly sad.”

“Cool,” Ed says.  “That’s what I aspire to.”

“I always suspected,” Roy says.  “But—to go back to one of the other things you mentioned—yes.  We went to different high schools in the city, and we kept in touch on weekends and so on, but it was a lot harder to stay up-to-date when we were in college—she went to Northwestern, but afterwards we both moved back, even though she didn’t really have much in the way of family here or anywhere.  I think she hated the snow more than she let on, to be honest with you.  And—it was my… fault.  I should say that; it was.  It was my _fault_ that she joined up, too.  We met up for coffee a few times, and I was telling her about how I was thinking of enlisting.”  The bitterness seeping into his voice freezes Ed’s hand where it lies on the mattress, halfway between them, crooked where he was about to stretch it out again.  “And about all of the wonderful things I was going to do, and the impact I was going to make, and what an important patriotic duty it was, and—”

“Hey,” Ed says, making his voice sound as gentle as he can.  He doesn’t have the talent for it that Roy does; he can’t command the resonance of his vocal cords with such surgical precision and strum _exactly_ the right note, but… sometimes he does okay.  “With the information that you had, you did the best thing that was available to you at the time.  You tried to do the right thing—and you made sacrifices to get to the point where you could.  That’s a hell of a lot more than most people can say about their lives.”

“Thank you,” Roy says.  “I suppose it’s slightly unfair to reexamine my own motives with the aid of some highly critical hindsight.”

“If what you just said, in English, was ‘I was young and naïve,’” Ed says, “then—yeah.”

Roy sighs—feelingly—lays his hand on top of Ed’s, and squeezes.

“That’s a charitable way of putting it,” he says.  “I just—I wanted to be a hero.  I’d spent so much of my life taking what I could get—so much of it reacting.  I wanted to have enough power to do things, and change things, and move people.  Enough power to be able to affect the world instead of the other way around.  It felt like the universe was spiraling without a direction, and if I just planted my feet on the ground right, maybe it would start spinning around _me_ , and everything would fall into place.  Maybe I could help.  Maybe I could fix some small measure of it if I took charge of my own existence and directed that impetus _forward_ —maybe I could bring the rest of the world with me in some way.”  He pauses.  “In addition, I was very hopeful that I would come out on the other side of the whole experience with broad shoulders and washboard abs, and people would start throwing themselves at me the instant I turned up back home in uniform.”

“You _do_ have great shoulders,” Ed says.

“You can thank basic training for that,” Roy says.

“Okay,” Ed says.  He clears his throat.  “Dear basic training—holy fucking shit, you did me a solid.  Thanks, man.”

Roy laughs—it’s not big, and it’s not dramatic, but it’s genuine, and it’s there, and it loosens some of the cords around Ed’s heart just a little bit.

“Well,” Roy says.  “Are you feeling very hopeful about some sleep?”

There are other things—there’s a list of other things.  When Riza got there; whether they were in the same unit; whether they fought together.  How Roy met Hughes.  Whether he was there for the death of his best friend, or it just got reported to him, casually, like a weather update.

“I’m always feeling hopeful about sleep,” Ed says.  “You may have to drag me out of this bed tomorrow by my ankles, to be honest.”

“Manhandling you is one of life’s finest pleasures,” Roy says.

“I can’t believe you just made me hear those words with my own two ears,” Ed says.

“You know, it’s funny,” Roy says.  “My own two ears have never heard you complaining at the time.”

“Shut up,” Ed says.  “And go to sleep.”

“Is there one you’d prefer me to do first?” Roy asks.

“I’ll leave that up to your extremely qualified discretion,” Ed says.  “C’mere—”

He gets a fistful of Roy’s shirt, and then a mouthful of Roy’s… mouth.  Well—not exactly a mouthful; Roy’s mouth isn’t _in_ his mouth; it’s just lip-to-lip, obviously; no weird cannibalistic shit or anyth…

Ed really does need some sleep.

“G’night, Roy,” he says when they part.

“Goodnight, my love,” Roy says softly.  “Sweet dreams.”

“You, too,” Ed says.


End file.
